How selfish individuals achieve unselfish goals: majority-based progressive control of discrete event systems

ABSTRACT

We present majority-based progressive control in which local supervisors have not only their own private specifications as primary goals, but an additional global specification representing a desirable behavior of the overall system. The control policy follows the majority rule, and the ultimate goal is to achieve a progressive closed-loop behavior whereby the number of local supervisors meeting private specifications increases as the controlled system evolves. For this purpose, we present the notion of majority-controllability of a global specification, and show that it is a crucial condition for the existence of local supervisors achieving a progressive global specification. Using the presented control theory, we analyze how the federal estate tax in the Unites States was repealed in 2010.

KEYWORDS:

• Discrete event systems
• supervisory control
• automaton
• state feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Jung-Min Yang http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1743-1061

Additional information

Funding

The research of S.-J. Park was supported by Basic Science Research Program through the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) funded by the Ministry of Science, ICT and Future Planning (No. NRF-2016R1A2B4006723). The research of J.-M. Yang was supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) grant funded by Ministry of Science and ICT (No. NRF-2018R1A5A1025137).