Safe Performance of an Industrial Autonomous Ground Vehicle in the Supervisory Control Framework

Abstract

A Cyberphysical system, being an autonomous guided vehicle (AGV) and having diverse applications such as thematic parks and product transfer in manufacturing units, is modeled and controlled. The models of all subsystems of the AGV are provided in discrete event systems (DES) form following the Ramadge–Wonham (R–W) framework. The safe performance of the AGV, being the desired behavior of the system, is presented in the form of desired rules and translated into a set of regular languages. Then, the regular languages are realized as supervisory automata in the framework of Supervisory Control Theory (SCT). To ease implementation and coordination of the control architecture, the supervisors are designed to be in two-state automata forms. The controllability of the regular languages, regarding the AGV, will be proved, using the physical realizability (PR) of the synchronous product of the automata of the system and the supervisors. Also, the nonblocking property of all the controlled automata will be proven to be satisfied. Simulation of the controlled AGV will validate the proposed method.