A general technique for the PLC-Based implementation of RW supervisors with time delay functions

The Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) introduced by Ramadge-Wonham (RW) is a general theory to design supervisors (controllers) for discrete event systems. Although over the two decades SCT has received wide attention in academia, industrial applications are very few, due to the fact that there is a discrepancy between the abstract RW supervisor and its physical implementation. In this paper, an easy to use, general and practical technique is proposed for the PLC-based implementation of RW supervisors with time delay functions. The applicability of the proposed method is demonstrated by means of a PLC-based real-time control of an experimental manufacturing system.