On the control of the paint factory scale model

This report is about the modelling and control of a paint factory scale model, located at the Technische Universiteit Eindhoven1 (TU/e) in Eindhoven, Netherlands. The goal of this study is to apply supervisory control theory (SCT), as defined by Peter J. Ramadge and W. Murray Wonham in their well-known article [Ramadge and Wonham, 1989], on a quite realistic system. But the classical state space explosion problem of SCT arises also in this case study. Thus we decided to apply the theory of coordination control, in order to synthesise several smaller supervisors and overcome this complexity issue. The two next sections describe the physical elements that take part in the scale model and its desired behaviour. A first attempt at TU/e to fully model the system using the SCT framework by a student had shown that the system is too complex for the computation of a single supervisor using standard SCT [Hamer, 2007]. We will see in section 4 how far this student and other ones have managed to model the physical system and compute a supervisor for it. Section 5 deals with our current proposition to model this system, thanks to the theory of coordination control, and includes a discussion of the results at the end.