Optimal Scheduling and Control of Networked Control Systems II

In a networked control system (NCS), sensors, actuators and controllers are spatially distributed and interconnected via a shared communication medium, i.e. control loops are closed through a real-time network. NCSs enable the integration of an increasing number of complex control systems implemented on distributed control units. The presence of the network inevitably introduces new challenges for the control engineering community that lie in the intersection of control and communication theory. The rst part of this report summarizes the research work carried out in the last two years. This includes theoretical advances and practical implementation and testing. New conditions for controllability (stabilizability) and observability (detectability) are presented for a class of linear NCS in a contention-free (time-triggered) paradigm. Stochastic algorithms are used to identify optimal communication sequences between the system components. Such algorithms allow to ef- ciently tackle the complex combinatorial optimization problems and scheduling constraints can be handled in a natural way. A custom built hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) system implementing a realistic vehicle adaptive cruise controller is used to validate the theoretical findings. The second part of this report gives a detailed plan for the future work to be performed. This includes the extension of the performance specication (quadratic so far) to H-infinity and mixed H-2/H-infinity. Also, the optimization will be extended to the contention-based (event-triggered) paradigm. To increase the complexity of the HIL simulation, the vehicle model will be equipped with extra sensors and actuators.