Examples are manufacturing systems, traffic systems and service systems generally.
Modelling and control of such systems can encounter major problems of state explosion. This has prompted the consideration of decentralized, hierarchical and heterarchical arc hitectures in an effort to find ways of managing DES control complexity. The talk is an informal account for nonspecialists of some current research in this direction. Since 1970 he has been a faculty member in Systems Control, with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering of the University of Toronto. Wonhamn's research interests have included stochastic control and filtering, geometric multivariable control, and discrete-event systems in a framework of automata and formal languages.