Non‐blocking decentralized control of discrete event systems based on Petri nets

The non‐blocking property of discrete event systems can formulate many practical and important properties of manufacturing systems, such as deadlock freeness, liveness and reversibility. But it is difficult to guarantee non‐blocking control. This paper presents a hybrid approach to decentralized control of discrete event systems. More generalized constraints are considered in this approach, which gives a graphical way of designing coordinators to keep the non‐blocking property of the closed‐loop system with decentralized supervisors. This approach also guarantees that the closed‐loop system is maximally permissive. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley and Sons Asia Pte Ltd and Chinese Automatic Control Society