Cyber-physical systems contain supervisory controllers that ensure the correct and safe behavior of a system. The development of such supervisory controllers becomes more and more complex, for instance due to increasing performance demands, more and more variants of the system, shortage of skilled engineers, and so on. This leads to larger development efforts and costs, and doesn’t scale towards the future. Companies need to work more efficiently, by doing more with less people.

State-of-the-art in engineering of supervisory controller is synthesis-based engineering (SBE). It combines model-based engineering with computer-aided design. It allows engineers to focus on ‘what’ the system should do (requirements) rather than ‘how’ it should do it (design and implementation), raise the abstraction level, automatically synthesize correct-by-construction supervisory controllers, and develop better controllers at lower cost.

While SBE is starting to be more broadly applied in industrial practice, adopting it is not without its challenges, as it is still rather new, differs from existing development approaches, and engineers are not yet familiar with it. It is therefore essential that the result of synthesis can be easily understood by the engineers, and that it is clear to them why this is the correct result. Currently, this is not always the case.

In this project, we research approaches to improve the SBE process, ensuring it is more explainable and traceable. Concretely, we improve the output by synthesis to be as compact, readable and human understandable as possible, develop means to make the effects of synthesis as explainable as possible, and improve traceability throughout the SBE process, from execution of the system all the way back to the specified requirements.