U OF M COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING
CONTROL SEMINAR SERIES
WINTER TERM 1998

Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Toronto

wonham@control.utoronto.ca

Friday, April 3, 1998
4:00 - 5:00 pm
1200 EECS

Title: Control Architecture for Discrete-Event Systems

• Abstract
  
  A relatively new branch of control science and engineering, discrete-event systems (DES) comprise a wide class of dynamic systems that are discrete in time and (usually) in state space, are asynchronous or event-driven, and may be nondeterministic. Examples are manufacturing systems, traffic systems and service systems generally. Modelling and control of such systems can encounter major problems of state explosion. This has prompted the consideration of decentralized, hierarchical and heterarchical arc hitectures in an effort to find ways of managing DES control complexity. The talk is an informal account for nonspecialists of some current research in this direction.

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  Biosketch

  
  W. Murray Wonham received the B. Eng. degree in engineering physics from McGill University (Montreal, Canada) in 1956, and the Ph.D. in control engineering from the University of Cambridge (U.K.) in 1961.

  From 1961 to 1969 he was associated with several U.S. research groups in control: the Control and Information Systems Laboratory at Purdue, the Research Institute for Advanced Studies (RIAS) of the Martin Marietta Co., the Division of Applied Mathematics at Brown University, and NASA's Office of Control Theory and Application.

  Since 1970 he has been a faculty member in Systems Control, with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Toronto. In addition he has held visiting lectureships at Washington University, M.I.T., the Institute of System Science of the Academia Sinica (Beijing), the University of Bremen, the Indian Institute of Technology (Kanpur), CINVESTAV (Guadalajara, Mexico) and other institutions.

  Wonhamn's research interests have included stochastic control and filtering, geometric multivariable control, and discrete-event systems in a framework of automata and formal languages. He is the author of "Linear Multivariable Control: A Geometric Approach" (1974, 1985).

  Wonham is a Fellow of the IEEE and of the Royal Society of Canada. In 1987 he received the IEEE Control Systems Science and Engineering Award, and in 1990 was Brouwer Medallist of the Netherlands Mathematical Society. In 1996 he was appointed University Professor in the University of Toronto.

© UofM College of Engineering Control Research Group - December 1997
bethi@umich.edu