Recent Developments in Discrete Event Systems

This article is a brief exposure of the process approach to a newly emerging area called "discrete event systems" in control theory and summarizes some of the recent developments in this area. Discrete event systems is an area of research that is developing within the interstices of computer, control and communication sciences. The basic direction of research addresses issues in the analysis and design of distributed intelligent systems operating within real time constraints. The article focuses on the concepts of an algebraic process approach and formulates supervisory control problems in this framework.