Automatic Synthesis of Sequential Control Schemes

Abstract: Of all hard- and software developed for industrial control purposes, the majority is devoted to sequential, or binary valued, control and only a minor part to classical linear control. Typically, the sequential parts of the controller are invoked during startup and shut-down to bring the system into its normal operating region and into some safe standby region, respectively. Despite its importance, fairly little theoretical research has been devoted to this area, and sequential control programs are therefore still created manually without much theoretical support to obtain a systematic approach.We propose a method to create sequential control programs automatically. The main idea is to spend some eort off-line modelling the plant, and from this model generate the control strategy, that is the plan. The plant is modelled using action structures, thereby concentrating on the actions instead of the states of the plant. In general the planning problem shows exponential complexity in the number of state variables. However, by focusing on the actions, we can identify problem classes as well as algorithms such that the planning complexity is reduced to polynomial complexity. We prove that these algorithms are sound, i.e., the generated solution will solve the stated problem, and complete, i.e., if the algorithms fail, then no solution exists. The algorithms generate a plan as a set of actions and a partial order on this set specifying the execution order. The generated plan is proven to be minimal and maximally parallel.For a larger class of problems we propose a method to split the original problem into a number of simpler problems that can each be solved using one of the presented algorithms. It is also shown how a plan can be translated into a GRAFCET chart, and to illustrate these ideas we have implemented a planning tool, i.e., a system that is able to automatically create control schemes. Such a tool can of course also be used on-line if it is fast enough. This possibility opens up completely new applications such as operator supervision and simplied error recovery and restart procedures after a plant fault has occurred.Additionally we analyze reachability for a restricted class of problems. For this class we state a reachability criterion that may be checked using a slightly modified version of one of the above mentioned algorithms.