Proceedings of 36th IEEE Conference on:
Decision and Control, 
Dec. 1997, San Diego, CA, USA,
IEEE Press


Title:
On Computing Optimal Controllers for Finite State Systems


Author:
Enrico Tronci
Univ. di L'Aquila
tronci@univaq.it
http://univaq.it/~tronci


From a computational point of view
many control problems involve
synthesis of controllers for Finite State Systems (FSSs).
In this paper we address the problem of automatic synthesis
of Optimal Controllers (OCs) for FSSs.
Such problem has been widely studied and many
algorithms are known for it.
However, because of state explosion
their use is limited to quite small dynamical system.

We devised a symbolic algorithm for automatic synthesis of
OCs for FSSs. 

In this paper we show practical usefulness of our techniques
by giving 
experimental results on the use of our 
symbolic algorithm to synthesize a C program implementing
an OC for a semiconductor manufacturing facility.
This entails computing
OCs for plants with about $3*10^{9}$ states. 
To the best of our knowledge no previous
algorithm can handle systems of such size.