An incremental approach for hardware discrete controller synthesis

Two main issues have been investigated: the combinational explosion, and the actual generation of the hardware controller. Most of the present approaches do not consider explicit communication between different components of a plant. We propose an incremental DCS technique which also applies to communicating systems. An initial modular abstraction is followed by a sequence of progressive refinements and computations of approximate control solutions. The last step of this sequence computes an exact controller. This technique is shown to have an improved time/memory efficiency with respect to the traditional global DCS approach. The hardware controller generation addresses the control non-determinism problem in a specific way. A partially closed-loop control architecture is proposed, in order to preserve the applicability of hierarchical design. A systematic technique is proposed and illustrated, for transforming the automatically generated control equation into a vector of control functions. An application of the DCS technique to the correction of certain design errors in a real design is illustrated. To prove the efficiency, a number of examples have been studied.

Autorentext

The author obtained his bachelor and master degrees in the School of Electrical Engineering of Xi'an Jiaotong University in China. He did his PhD research in Ampere Laboratory of INSA de Lyon and has finished a Post-doc research in CNRS of France. The author works on formal verification and discrete controller synthesis of embedded systems.