In order to cope with situations in which a plant's dynamics are not
precisely known, we consider the problem of supervisory control for a class of
discrete event systems modelled by fuzzy automata. The behavior of such
discrete event systems is described by fuzzy languages; the supervisors are
event feedback and can disable only controllable events with any degree. The
concept of discrete event system controllability is thus extended by
incorporating fuzziness. In this new sense, we present a necessary and
sufficient condition for a fuzzy language to be controllable. We also study the
supremal controllable fuzzy sublanguage and the infimal controllable fuzzy
superlanguage when a given pre-specified desired fuzzy language is
uncontrollable. Our framework generalizes that of Ramadge-Wonham and reduces to
Ramadge-Wonham framework when membership grades in all fuzzy languages must be
either 0 or 1. The theoretical development is accompanied by illustrative
numerical examples.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figure