Property Enforcement for Partially- Observed Discrete-Event Systems

Engineering systems that involve physical elements, such as automobiles,
aircraft, or electric power pants, that are controlled by a computational
infrastructure that consists of several computers that communicate through a
communication network, are called Cyber-Physical Systems. Ever-increasing
demands for safety, security, performance, and certification of these critical
systems put stringent constraints on their design and necessitate the use of
formal model-based approaches to synthesize provably-correct feedback
controllers. This dissertation aims to tackle these challenges by developing a
novel methodology for synthesis of control and sensing strategies for Discrete-
Event Systems (DESs), an important class of cyber-physical systems. First, we
develop a uniform approach for synthesizing property enforcing supervisors
for a wide class of properties called information-state-based (IS-based)
property. We then consider the enforcement of non-blockingness in addition
to IS-based properties. We develop a finite structure called the All
Enforcement Structure (AES) that enumerates all valid supervisors.
Furthermore, we propose novel and general approaches to solve the sensor
activation problem for partially-observed DES. We extend our results for the
sensor activation problem from the centralized case to the decentralized case.