ECE Seminar: Supervisory Control of Discrete Event Systems: A Retrospective and Two Recent Results on Privacy and Security

We start with a brief retrospective of the theory of supervisory control of discrete event systems, initiated in the seminal work of Ramadge & Wonham over 30 years ago, and compare it with recent work on formal methods in control. We then present results from our group on two problems: (i) obfuscation of system secrets by insertion of fictitious events in the output stream of the system; and (ii) sensor deception attacks in the supervisory control layer of a cyber-physical system. In each case, we describe our solution procedure, which is based on synthesizing a discrete game structure that embeds all valid solutions.