Spyros Reveliotis will continue his talk from last Wednesday.

Sequential resource allocation systems (RAS) constitute a pertinent modeling abstraction for the operational dynamics of a broad range of contemporary technological applications, including production systems, material handling and railway / monorail systems, e-commerce and other service-related processes, and even computational environments like those emerging in internet-based computing. In all these environments, a set of concurrently executing processes contest for the sequential exclusive acquisition of a finite set of re-usable resources that are necessary to support the execution of their various processing stages. The resulting resource allocation process must be controlled for (i) operational efficiency, a requirement giving rise to scheduling problems in the context of these environments, but also, for (ii) logical correctness and inherent consistency, a requirement addressed by an emerging logical control theory for these systems. The effective logical control of the aforementioned applications becomes an even more important problem as these environments migrate to extensively automated operational modes.

This talk will survey the state-of-the-art in RAS logical control. More specifically, the first part of the talk will provide a general description of the problem and a formal characterization of it in the Discrete Event Systems (Ramadge & Wonham