Petri Nets and Agents to Supervisory Control of Complex Environment

Abstract

In semiautonomous mobile sensor networks, since human operators may be involved in the control loop, particular improper actions may cause accidents and result in catastrophes. For such systems, this paper proposes a command filtering framework to accept or reject human-issued commands so that undesirable executions are never performed. In the present approach, Petri nets are used to model the operated behaviors and to synthesize the command filters for supervision. Also, the command filter could be implemented using agent technology by associating a filtering agent for each robot. It is believed that the technique presented in this paper could be further applied to large-scale wireless mobile sensor networks.