Supervisory Control with Event Forcing Under Partial Observation

Abstract

In this paper, we address supervisory control in discrete-event systems with event forcing. In particular, partial observation of the supervisor is considered. Unlike traditional supervisory control, which relies on event enablement and disablement, the forcing mechanism allows a supervisor to preempt unwanted transitions by actively triggering forcible events. Under partial observation, we face a new challenge where the supervisor's forcing decisions must be consistent across all indistinguishable strings meanwhile guarantee all violating transitions are excluded through preemption. We introduce the concept of forcing consistency as a necessary and sufficient condition for the existence of a supervisor that achieves a given specification. We prove that forcing consistency is strictly stronger than the notion of forcibility but, unlike the latter, is not closed under union. These results lay the theoretical foundation for supervisor synthesis in the presence of both forcing mechanisms and observation limitations.