Rational semimodules over the max-plus semiring and geometric approach of discrete event systems

We introduce rational semimodules over semirings whose addition is idempotent, like the max-plus semiring, in order to extend the geometric approach of linear control to discrete event systems. We say that a subsemimodule of the free semimodule S^n over a semiring S is rational if it has a generating family that is a rational subset of S^n, S^n being thought of as a monoid under the entrywise product. We show that for various semirings of max-plus type whose elements are integers, rational semimodules are stable under the natural algebraic operations (union, product, direct and inverse image, intersection, projection, etc). We show that the reachable and observable spaces of max-plus linear dynamical systems are rational, and give various examples.Comment: 24 pages, 9 postscript figures; example in section 4.3 expande

Conditions for Hierarchical Supervisory Control under Partial Observation

The fundamental problem in hierarchical supervisory control under partial observation is to find conditions preserving observability between the original (low-level) and the abstracted (high-level) plants. Two conditions for observable specifications were identified in the literature -- observation consistency (OC) and local observation consistency (LOC). However, the decidability of OC and LOC were left open. We show that both OC and LOC are decidable for regular systems. We further show that these conditions do not guarantee that supremal (normal or relatively observable) sublanguages computed on the low level and on the high level always coincide. To solve the issue, we suggest a new condition -- modified observation consistency -- and show that under this condition, the supremal normal sublanguages are preserved between the levels, while the supremal relatively observable high-level sublanguage is at least as good as the supremal relatively observable low-level sublanguage, i.e., the high-level solution may be even better than the low-level solution