In recent years, the enormous evolution of computer technology has led to the proliferation of dynamical systems that are mostly man made and highly complex. The behaviour of these systems is determined by the occurrence of asynchronous events: because of this attribute they are labeled as Discrete Event Systems (DES). Examples of such systems are encountered in many well known application areas such as automated manufacturing, computer networks, transportation, air traffic control, as well as in new emerging areas such as healthcare, communication and information processing, allocation and management of technical, human and financial resources. In the last decades the attention of a large number of researchers and practitioners has been devoted to this class of dynamical systems in order to address a series of difficult problems of combinatorial nature to analyze, optimize and control DES.
The goal of this special issue is to bring together researchers and practitioners from both academia and industry into a forum that will reveal the state-of-the-art of research and applications in the general area of DES automation, present efficient scientific and engineering solutions to a series of problems related to supervisory control, fault diagnosis, analysis, etc., and provide visions for future research and development.
