Time-and event-driven communication process for networked control systems: A survey

Copyright © 2014 Lei Zou et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.In recent years, theoretical and practical research topics on networked control systems (NCSs) have gained an increasing interest from many researchers in a variety of disciplines owing to the extensive applications of NCSs in practice. In particular, an urgent need has arisen to understand the effects of communication processes on system performances. Sampling and protocol are two fundamental aspects of a communication process which have attracted a great deal of research attention. Most research focus has been on the analysis and control of dynamical behaviors under certain sampling procedures and communication protocols. In this paper, we aim to survey some recent advances on the analysis and synthesis issues of NCSs with different sampling procedures (time-and event-driven sampling) and protocols (static and dynamic protocols). First, these sampling procedures and protocols are introduced in detail according to their engineering backgrounds as well as dynamic natures. Then, the developments of the stabilization, control, and filtering problems are systematically reviewed and discussed in great detail. Finally, we conclude the paper by outlining future research challenges for analysis and synthesis problems of NCSs with different communication processes.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61329301, 61374127, and 61374010, the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

Distributed Event-Based State Estimation for Networked Systems: An LMI-Approach

In this work, a dynamic system is controlled by multiple sensor-actuator agents, each of them commanding and observing parts of the system's input and output. The different agents sporadically exchange data with each other via a common bus network according to local event-triggering protocols. From these data, each agent estimates the complete dynamic state of the system and uses its estimate for feedback control. We propose a synthesis procedure for designing the agents' state estimators and the event triggering thresholds. The resulting distributed and event-based control system is guaranteed to be stable and to satisfy a predefined estimation performance criterion. The approach is applied to the control of a vehicle platoon, where the method's trade-off between performance and communication, and the scalability in the number of agents is demonstrated.Comment: This is an extended version of an article to appear in the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (additional parts in the Appendix

Event-based H∞ consensus control of multi-agent systems with relative output feedback: The finite-horizon case

In this technical note, the H∞ consensus control problem is investigated over a finite horizon for general discrete time-varying multi-agent systems subject to energy-bounded external disturbances. A decentralized estimation-based output feedback control protocol is put forward via the relative output measurements. A novel event-based mechanism is proposed for each intelligent agent to utilize the available information in order to decide when to broadcast messages and update control input. The aim of the problem addressed is to co-design the time-varying controller and estimator parameters such that the controlled multi-agent systems achieve consensus with a disturbance attenuation level γ over a finite horizon [0,T]. A constrained recursive Riccati difference equation approach is developed to derive the sufficient conditions under which the H∞ consensus performance is guaranteed in the framework of event-based scheme. Furthermore, the desired controller and estimator parameters can be iteratively computed by resorting to the Moore-Penrose pseudo inverse. Finally, the effectiveness of the developed event-based H∞ consensus control strategy is demonstrated in the numerical simulation

Event-triggered Consensus Frameworks for Multi-agent Systems

Recently, distributed multi-agent systems (MAS) have been widely studied for a variety of engineering applications, including cooperative vehicular systems, sensor networks, and electrical power grids. To solve the allocated tasks in MASs, each agent autonomously determines the appropriate actions using information available locally and received from its neighbours. Many cooperative behaviours in MAS are based on a consensus algorithm. Consensus, by definition, is to distributively agree on a parameter of interest between the agents. Depending on the application, consensus has different configurations such as leader-following, formation, synchronization in robotic arms, and state estimation in sensor networks. Consensus in MASs requires local measurements and information exchanges between the neighbouring agents. Due to the energy restriction, hardware limitation, and bandwidth constraint, strategies that reduce the amount of measurements and information exchanges between the agents are of paramount interest. Event-triggering transmission schemes are among the most recent strategies that efficiently reduce the number of transmissions. This dissertation proposes a number of event-triggered consensus (ETC) implementations which are applicable to MASs. Different performance objectives and physical constraints, such as a desired convergence rate, robustness to uncertainty in control realization, information quantization, sampled-data processing, and resilience to denial of service (DoS) attacks are included in realization of the proposed algorithms. A novel convex optimization is proposed which simultaneously designs the control and event-triggering parameters in a unified framework. The optimization governs the trade-off between the consensus convergence rate and intensity of transmissions. This co-design optimization is extended to an advanced class of event-triggered schemes, known as the dynamic event-triggering (DET), which is able to substantially reduce the amount of transmissions. In the presence of DoS attacks, the co-design optimization simultaneously computes the control and DET parameters so that the number of transmissions is reduced and a desired level of resilience to DoS is guaranteed. In addition to consensus, a formation-containment implementation is proposed, where the amount of transmissions are reduced using the DET schemes. The performance of the proposed implementations are evaluated through simulation over several MASs. The experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed implementations and verify their design flexibility

Feedback Control Goes Wireless: Guaranteed Stability over Low-power Multi-hop Networks

Closing feedback loops fast and over long distances is key to emerging applications; for example, robot motion control and swarm coordination require update intervals of tens of milliseconds. Low-power wireless technology is preferred for its low cost, small form factor, and flexibility, especially if the devices support multi-hop communication. So far, however, feedback control over wireless multi-hop networks has only been shown for update intervals on the order of seconds. This paper presents a wireless embedded system that tames imperfections impairing control performance (e.g., jitter and message loss), and a control design that exploits the essential properties of this system to provably guarantee closed-loop stability for physical processes with linear time-invariant dynamics. Using experiments on a cyber-physical testbed with 20 wireless nodes and multiple cart-pole systems, we are the first to demonstrate and evaluate feedback control and coordination over wireless multi-hop networks for update intervals of 20 to 50 milliseconds.Comment: Accepted final version to appear in: 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Cyber-Physical Systems (with CPS-IoT Week 2019) (ICCPS '19), April 16--18, 2019, Montreal, QC, Canad

Event-triggered synchronization of saturated lur’e type systems

This dissertation addresses the problem of master-slave synchronization of nonlinear discrete-time Lur’e systems subject to input saturation via event-triggered control (ETC) techniques. Synchronization, which is considered a remarkable property in the physics literature specially when chaotic systems are under investigation, is achieved through the stabilization of the error between the states of the master and the slave system. Regarding the Lur’e type nonlinearity, two different cases are studied along this work: generic slope-restricted state-dependent nonlinearity and piecewise-affine function. In the ETC paradigm, the control signal is updated aperiodically only after the occurrence of an event, which is generated according to a triggering criterion that depends on the evaluation of a triggering function. In the emulation-based design, a synchronization error feedback controller is given a priori and the task is to compute the event generator parameters ensuring performance and closed-loop stability. On the other hand, in the co-design approach the event generator and the control law are simultaneously designed. Theoretical results are obtained for three types of event-triggered mechanism (ETM), namely: static, dynamic and relaxed. In the last case, practical synchronization conditions are derived as form of ultimately boundedness stability. In order to tune the parameters of the event-based strategy, optimization problems are formulated aiming to reduce the number of control signal updates (number of events) with respect to a time-triggered implementation. Numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the application of the proposed methods.Esta dissertação aborda o problema de sincronização mestre-escravo de sistemas Lur’e não lineares de tempo discreto sujeitos à saturação de entrada via técnicas de controle baseado em eventos. A sincronização, que é considerada uma propriedade importante na literatura de Física especialmente quando sistemas caóticos são investigados, é alcançada através da estabilização do erro entre os estados do mestre e do sistema escravo. Em relação à não linearidade do tipo Lur’e, dois casos diferentes são estudados ao longo do trabalho: não linearidade genérica dependente do estado e restrita em inclinação e função afim por partes. No paradigma de controle baseado em eventos (ETC), o sinal de controle é atualizado aperiodicamente apenas após a ocorrência de um evento, que é gerado de acordo com um critério de disparo que depende da avaliação de uma função de disparo. No projeto baseado em emulação, um controlador por realimentação do erro de sincronização é dado a priori e a tarefa é calcular os parâmetros do gerador de eventos garantindo desempenho e estabilidade em malha fechada. Na abordagem de co-design, o gerador de eventos e a lei de controle são projetados simultaneamente. Resultados teóricos são obtidos para três tipos de mecanismo de geração de eventos (ETM), nomeadamente: estático, dinâmico e relaxado. Neste último caso, condições de sincronização prática são derivadas como uma forma de estabilidade ultimamente limitada. Para sintonizar os parâmetros da estratégia baseada em eventos, problemas de otimização são formulados visando reduzir o número de atualizações do sinal de controle (número de eventos) em relação a uma implementação time-triggered. Simulações numéricas são apresentadas para ilustrar a aplicação dos métodos propostos