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Topic 

Supervisory Control鈥揇riven Scheduling for Complex Manufacturing Systems

Abstract

This talk explores how ideas from Supervisory Control Theory can be used to rethink scheduling in modern manufacturing environments. Instead of treating scheduling as a purely combinatorial search鈥攚here countless candidate solutions are generated and most turn out to be infeasible鈥攚e start from a model鈥慴ased perspective. By capturing system behavior, constraints, and resource interactions in an automaton framework, we ensure that every schedule considered is feasible by construction.

I will show how this shift in perspective helps address classical challenges such as machine coordination, buffer limitations, blocking, and timing requirements. The talk highlights how supervisory control provides a structured way to represent system dynamics, how abstractions reduce complexity to manageable levels, and how optimization or heuristic methods can then operate on these safe behavioral models. Through examples drawn from flexible manufacturing systems, we illustrate how this approach leads to efficient, reliable schedules and opens the door to Multi objective decision鈥憁aking, including energy鈥慳ware and throughput鈥憃riented planning.

The goal is to give a broad view of how control鈥憈heoretic modeling can support smarter scheduling in real industrial settings, bridging the gap between theory and practical decision鈥憁aking.

About the speaker

Patr铆cia N. Pena received the B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG), Brazil, in 2000 and 2002, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina (UFSC), Brazil, in 2007.  During PhD, she spent a year with Prof. St茅phane Lafortune at the University of Michigan.  

In June 2008, she became a tenured Professor at the Department of Electronics Engineering at UFMG and a full professor in 2024. Her research interests include discrete-event systems, supervisory control, optimization, and their applications to manufacturing systems, robotics and cyber security. She served as an appointed member at the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors (2024-2025). Since 2020, she is a member of the IFAC Executive Committee on Diversity and Inclusion and, starting in 2026, she is a co-chair of the IEEE CSS Women in Control.

In 2026, she is in a sabbatical year at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden.

Your Host

Michel Reniers, Associate Professor at the department of Mechanical Engineering.

Registration is required but free of charge.