A General Control Switching Framework for Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems

We present a supervisory control architecture with control redundancy. We assume an adaptive architecture for the problem of switching from one control module to another when sensors used for observing events in the plant fail or become unavailable. It is assumed that there is an actual controller and a number of virtual controllers. The actual controller is in real feedback loop with the plant whereas the virtual ones are in virtual feedback such that the coupled behaviour of any of these control modules with plant conforms to what is called normality criterion in the context of partial observation. Every time that a failure occurs and the environment changes, the actual controller is replaced by one of these virtual ones according to specified optimality criteria.