Decentralized Control of Timed Discrete-Event Systems under Bounded Delay Communication

Synchronous communication protocols have been synthesized for untimed decentralized discrete-event control problems, where controllers transmit their information through a zero-delay communication channel. In practice, communication occurs with some delay in the channel. A timed discrete-event system (TDES) models the passage of time using a tick event. In this paper, we seek to identify conditions under which methods developed for constructing communication protocols in untimed DES can be used for acyclic TDES. As a result, instead of directly synthesizing a communication protocol for bounded delay, we present a procedure for converting the problem to an equivalent TDES control problem with synchronous communication.