Engineering approaches for supervisory controller development

Supervisory controllers can be developed in various ways. The following figure gives an overview. It shows multiple approaches to design and engineer supervisory controllers, as well as how these approaches relate to each other:

overview

The columns indicate various engineering approaches. From left to right, they employ progressively more automation and computer assistance. The rows of the table indicate typical steps involved in the development of supervisory controllers. The cells indicate for each approach what is involved in the particular step. The green-colored cells indicate that the step involves mostly, or at least significant, manual work for the particular engineering approach. Contrarily, the gray-colored cells indicate that the step is (mostly) automated for that approach. As the steps with more manual work generally require the most engineering effort, the green cells also indicate where the engineering focus is for a particular approach. Bold texts in cells indicate changes compared to the previous column.

Typical steps involved in the development of supervisory controllers, as represented by the rows from top to bottom, are:

Typically, the various engineering approaches as represented by the columns from left to right, can be characterized as follows:

The use of model-based engineering combined with computer-aided design, through formal methods like formal verification and supervisory controller synthesis, has many advantages. It allows to produce unambiguous, complete, consistent, and up-to-date specifications, leading to higher quality controllers at similar or even lower effort and costs.

After this general comparison of the approaches, the following provides more detailed information: