Research of discrete event systems is strongly motivated by applications
in flex- ible manufacturing, in traffic control and in concurrent and
real-time software verification and design, just to mention a few
important areas. Discrete event system theory is a promising and
dynamically developing area of both control theory and computer science.
Discrete event systems are systems with non-numerically-valued states,
inputs, and outputs. The approaches to the modelling and control of
these systems can be roughly divided into two groups. The first group is
concerned with the automatic design of controllers from formal
specifications of logical requirements. This re- search owes much to the
pioneering work of P.J. Ramadge and W.M. Wonham at the beginning of the
eighties. The second group deals with the analysis and op- timization of
system throughput, waiting time, and other performance measures for
discrete event systems. The present book contains selected papers
presented at the Joint Workshop on Discrete Event Systems (WODES'92)
held in Prague, Czechoslovakia, on Au- gust 26-28, 1992 and organized by
the Institute of Information Theory and Au- tomation of the Czechoslovak
Academy of Sciences, Prague, Czechoslovakia, by the Automatic Control
Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH), Zurich,
Switzerland, and by the Department of Computing Science of the
University of Groningen, Groningen, the Netherlands.