Deadlock detection and controller synthesis for production systems using partial order techniques

Discrete event systems can be used to model the behaviour of production systems. The supervisory control theory is a suitable tool for synthesising controllers that coordinate the resource utilisation of concurrent products in the production system. Due to the combinatorial state space explosion, computations become intractable for most real life systems. To alleviate this problem, methods that do not enumerate the entire state space are needed. One method that has proven valuable for the verification of concurrent systems is based on partial order principles. For a certain class of production systems it is shown how such ideas may be used to synthesise non-blocking discrete event controllers.