Supervisory Control Theory in Epistemic Temporal Logic

International audienceSupervisory control theory deals with problems related to the existence and the synthesis of supervisors. The role of a supervisor in a system is to control and restrict the behavior of this system in order to realize a specific behavior. When there are multiple supervisors, such systems are in fact multi-agent systems. The results of supervisory control theory are usually expressed in terms of operations like intersection and inclusion between formal languages. We reformulate them in terms of model checking problems in an epistemic temporal logic. Our reformulations are very close to natural language expressions and highlight their under-lying intuitions. From an applied perspective, they pave the way for applying model checking techniques developed for epistemic temporal logics to the problems of supervisory control theory

Hierarchical agent supervision

Agent supervision is a form of control/customization where a supervisor restricts the behavior of an agent to enforce certain requirements, while leaving the agent as much autonomy as possible. To facilitate supervision, it is often of interest to consider hierarchical models where a high level abstracts over low-level behavior details. We study hierarchical agent supervision in the context of the situation calculus and the ConGolog agent programming language, where we have a rich first-order representation of the agent state. We define the constraints that ensure that the controllability of in-dividual actions at the high level in fact captures the controllability of their implementation at the low level. On the basis of this, we show that we can obtain the maximally permissive supervisor by first considering only the high-level model and obtaining a high- level supervisor and then refining its actions locally, thus greatly simplifying the supervisor synthesis task

Supervisory Controller Synthesis for Non-terminating Processes is an Obliging Game

We present a new algorithm to solve the supervisory control problem over non-terminating processes modeled as $\omega$-regular automata. A solution to this problem was obtained by Thistle in 1995 which uses complex manipulations of automata. We show a new solution to the problem through a reduction to obliging games, which, in turn, can be reduced to $\omega$-regular reactive synthesis. Therefore, our reduction results in a symbolic algorithm based on manipulating sets of states using tools from reactive synthesis

Changing Observations in Epistemic Temporal Logic

We study dynamic changes of agents' observational power in logics of knowledge and time. We consider CTL*K, the extension of CTL* with knowledge operators, and enrich it with a new operator that models a change in an agent's way of observing the system. We extend the classic semantics of knowledge for perfect-recall agents to account for changes of observation, and we show that this new operator strictly increases the expressivity of CTL*K. We reduce the model-checking problem for our logic to that for CTL*K, which is known to be decidable. This provides a solution to the model-checking problem for our logic, but its complexity is not optimal. Indeed we provide a direct decision procedure with better complexity

Supervisory Control Theory in Epistemic Temporal Logic

International audienceSupervisory control theory deals with problems related to the existence and the synthesis of supervisors. The role of a supervisor in a system is to control and restrict the behavior of this system in order to realize a specific behavior. When there are multiple supervisors, such systems are in fact multi-agent systems. The results of supervisory control theory are usually expressed in terms of operations like intersection and inclusion between formal languages. We reformulate them in terms of model checking problems in an epistemic temporal logic. Our reformulations are very close to natural language expressions and highlight their under-lying intuitions. From an applied perspective, they pave the way for applying model checking techniques developed for epistemic temporal logics to the problems of supervisory control theory