September 15, 2017, Stéphane Lafortune, University of Michigan

Friday, September 15, 2017, 2pm-3pm
8 St. Mary’s Street, PHO 211
Refreshments at 1:45pm

Stéphane Lafortune
University of Michigan

Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems: A Retrospective and Future Perspectives

Thirty years have elapsed since the publication in the control engineering literature of the seminal papers of Ramadge and Wonham that launched the theory of supervisory control for discrete event systems. This theory was subsequently significantly developed to handle a large class of control architectures with horizontal or vertical modularity. In parallel, significant advances were made in the area of formal methods in computer science, from verification problems for closed systems to reactive synthesis problems for systems that interact with their environment. More recently, the area of formal methods in control has emerged, primarily in the context of cyber-physical systems that are abstracted as discrete transition systems subject to specifications expressed in temporal logic. We will first present our views on how these research areas intersect and complement each other. We will then describe some recent work on the synthesis of supervisors and sensor activation policies for partially-observed systems. Finally, we will conclude with some future perspectives.

Stéphane Lafortune is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. He obtained his degrees from Ecole Polytechnique de Montréal (B.Eng), McGill University (M.Eng), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD), all in electrical engineering. Dr. Lafortune is a Fellow of the IEEE (1999). His research interests are in discrete event systems and include multiple problem domains: modeling, diagnosis, control, optimization, and applications to computer systems. He co-authored, with C. Cassandras, the textbook Introduction to Discrete Event Systems (2nd Edition, Springer, 2008). He is co-developer of the software packages DESUMA and UMDES.

Faculty Host: Christos Cassandras
Student Host: Rebecca Swaszek