Embedded systems have to be adaptive and perform reconfigurations in reaction to environment changes, related to resources or dependability. The management of this dynamical adaptivity, as in autonomic systems, can be seen as a control loop, on continuous or discrete criteria. Embedded systems are also safety-critical, and must be statically checkable for predictability. Formal techniques provide support for specification, validation and verification. E.g., the reactive systems approach exploits models and automated tools based on state machines. This position paper aims at drawing the attention towards the potential of discrete controller synthesis (DCS) techniques, and programming languages and analysis and synthesis tools to support them. We base our position on previous work and draw directions towards the model-based control of adaptive systems.