  This paper identifies a property of delay-robustness in distributed
supervisory control of discrete-event systems (DES) with communication delays.
In previous work a distributed supervisory control problem has been
investigated on the assumption that inter-agent communications take place with
negligible delay. From an applications viewpoint it is desirable to relax this
constraint and identify communicating distributed controllers which are
delay-robust, namely logically equivalent to their delay-free counterparts. For
this we introduce inter-agent channels modeled as 2-state automata, compute the
overall system behavior, and present an effective computational test for
delay-robustness. From the test it typically results that the given delay-free
distributed control is delay-robust with respect to certain communicated
events, but not for all, thus distinguishing events which are not
delay-critical from those that are. The approach is illustrated by a workcell
model with three communicating agents.
