A language measure for supervisory control

This paper formulates a signed real measure for sublanguages of regular languages based on the principles of automata theory and real analysis. The measure provides total ordering on the controlled behavior of a finite-state automaton plant under different supervisors. Total variation of the measure serves as a metric for the infinite-dimensional vector space of the sublanguages of a regular language over the finite field GF(2). The computational complexity of the language measure is of polynomial order in the number of plant states.