Tools for Real-Time Control Systems Co-Design : A Survey

This report presents a survey of current simulation tools in the area of integrated control and real-time systems design. Each tool is presented with a quick overview followed by a more detailed section describing comparative aspects of the tool. These aspects describe the context and purpose of the tool (scenarios, development stages, activities, and qualities/constraints being addressed) and the actual tool technology (tool architecture, inputs, outputs, modeling content, extensibility and availability). The tools presented in the survey are the following; Jitterbug and TrueTime from the Department of Automatic Control at Lund University, Sweden, AIDA and XILO from the Department of Machine Design at the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, Ptolemy II from the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences at Berkeley, California, RTSIM from the RETIS Laboratory, Pisa, Italy, and Syndex and Orccad from INRIA, France. The survey also briefly describes some existing commercial tools related to the area of real-time control systems

Flexible Scheduling Methods and Tools for Real-Time Control Systems

This thesis deals with flexibility in the design of real-time control systems. By dynamic resource scheduling it is possible to achieve on-line adaptability and increased control performance under resource constraints. The approach requires simulation tools for control and real-time systems co-design. One approach to achieve flexibility in the run-time scheduling of control tasks is feedback scheduling, where resources are scheduled dynamically based on measurements of actual timing variations and control performance. An overview of feedback scheduling techniques for control systems is presented.A flexible strategy for implementation of model predictive control (MPC) is described. In MPC, the control signal in each sample is obtained by the solution of a constrained quadratic optimization problem. A termination criterion is derived that, unlike traditional MPC, takes the effects of computational delay into account in the optimization. A scheduling scheme is also described, where the MPC cost functions being minimized are used as dynamic task priorities for a set of MPC tasks. The MATLAB/Simulink-based simulator TrueTime is presented. TrueTime is a co-design tool that facilitates simulation of distributed real-time control systems, where the execution of controller tasks in a real-time kernel is simulated in parallel with network transmissions and the continuous-time plant dynamics. Using TrueTime it is possible to study the effects of CPU and network scheduling on control performance and to experiment with flexible scheduling techniques and compensation schemes. A general overview of the simulator is given and the event-based kernel implementation is described.TrueTime is used in two simulation case studies. The first emulates TCP on top of standard Ethernet to simulate networked control of a robot system. The second case study uses TrueTime to simulate a web server application. A feedback scheduling strategy for QoS control in the web server is described

Optimization and Control of Cyber-Physical Vehicle Systems

A cyber-physical system (CPS) is composed of tightly-integrated computation, communication and physical elements. Medical devices, buildings, mobile devices, robots, transportation and energy systems can benefit from CPS co-design and optimization techniques. Cyber-physical vehicle systems (CPVSs) are rapidly advancing due to progress in real-time computing, control and artificial intelligence. Multidisciplinary or multi-objective design optimization maximizes CPS efficiency, capability and safety, while online regulation enables the vehicle to be responsive to disturbances, modeling errors and uncertainties. CPVS optimization occurs at design-time and at run-time. This paper surveys the run-time cooperative optimization or co-optimization of cyber and physical systems, which have historically been considered separately. A run-time CPVS is also cooperatively regulated or co-regulated when cyber and physical resources are utilized in a manner that is responsive to both cyber and physical system requirements. This paper surveys research that considers both cyber and physical resources in co-optimization and co-regulation schemes with applications to mobile robotic and vehicle systems. Time-varying sampling patterns, sensor scheduling, anytime control, feedback scheduling, task and motion planning and resource sharing are examined