Privacy-Preserving Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems via Co-Synthesis of Edit Function and Supervisor for Opacity Enforcement and Requirement Satisfaction

Abstract: This paper investigates the problem of co-synthesis of edit function and supervisor for opacity enforcement in the supervisory control of discrete-event systems (DES), assuming the presence of an external (passive) intruder, where the following goals need to be achieved: 1) the external intruder should never infer the system secret, i.e., the system is opaque, and never be sure about the existence of the edit function, i.e., the edit function remains covert; 2) the controlled plant behaviors should satisfy some safety and nonblockingness requirements, in the presence of the edit function. We focus on the class of edit functions that satisfy the following properties: 1) the observation capability of the edit function in general can be different from those of the supervisor and the intruder; 2) the edit function can implement insertion, deletion, and replacement operations; 3) the edit function performs bounded edit operations, i.e., the length of each string output of the edit function is upper bounded by a given constant. We propose an approach to solve this co-synthesis problem by modeling it as a distributed supervisor synthesis problem in the Ramadge-Wonham supervisory control framework. By taking the special structure of this distributed supervisor synthesis problem into consideration and to improve the possibility of finding a non-empty distributed supervisor, we propose two novel synthesis heuristics that incrementally synthesize the supervisor and the edit function. The effectiveness of our approach is illustrated on an example in the enforcement of the location privacy.