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

Networked control systems in the presence of scheduling protocols and communication delays

This paper develops the time-delay approach to Networked Control Systems (NCSs) in the presence of variable transmission delays, sampling intervals and communication constraints. The system sensor nodes are supposed to be distributed over a network. Due to communication constraints only one node output is transmitted through the communication channel at once. The scheduling of sensor information towards the controller is ruled by a weighted Try-Once-Discard (TOD) or by Round-Robin (RR) protocols. Differently from the existing results on NCSs in the presence of scheduling protocols (in the frameworks of hybrid and discrete-time systems), we allow the communication delays to be greater than the sampling intervals. A novel hybrid system model for the closed-loop system is presented that contains {\it time-varying delays in the continuous dynamics and in the reset conditions}. A new Lyapunov-Krasovskii method, which is based on discontinuous in time Lyapunov functionals is introduced for the stability analysis of the delayed hybrid systems. Polytopic type uncertainties in the system model can be easily included in the analysis. The efficiency of the time-delay approach is illustrated on the examples of uncertain cart-pendulum and of batch reactor

Networked PID control design : a pseudo-probabilistic robust approach

Networked Control Systems (NCS) are feedback/feed-forward control systems where control components (sensors, actuators and controllers) are distributed across a common communication network. In NCS, there exist network-induced random delays in each channel. This paper proposes a method to compensate the effects of these delays for the design and tuning of PID controllers. The control design is formulated as a constrained optimization problem and the controller stability and robustness criteria are incorporated as design constraints. The design is based on a polytopic description of the system using a Poisson pdf distribution of the delay. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the performance of the proposed method

Observer-based H∞ control of networked systems with stochastic communication protocol: The finite-horizon case

This paper is concerned with the H ∞ control problem for a class of linear time-varying networked control systems (NCSs) with stochastic communication protocol (SCP). The sensor-to-controller network (the controller-to-actuator network) is considered where only one sensor (one actuator) obtains access to the communication network at each transmission instant. The SCP is applied to determine which sensor (actuator) should be given the access to the network at a certain instant. The aim of the problem addressed is to design an observer-based controller such that the H ∞ performance of the closed-loop system is guaranteed over a given finite horizon. For the purpose of simplifying the NCS model, a new Markov chain is constructed to model the SCP scheduling of communication networks. Then, both the methods of stochastic analysis and completing squares are utilized to establish the sufficient conditions for the existence of the desired controller. The controller parameters are characterized by solving two coupled backward recursive Riccati difference equations subject to the scheduled SCP. Finally, a numerical example is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed controller design scheme

Networked and event-triggered control systems

In this thesis, control algorithms are studied that are tailored for platforms with limited computation and communication resources. The interest in such control algorithms is motivated by the fact that nowadays control algorithms are implemented on small and inexpensive embedded microprocessors and that the sensors, actuators and controllers are connected through multipurpose communication networks. To handle the fact that computation power is no longer abundant and that communication networks do not have in finite bandwidth, the control algorithms need to be either robust for the deficiencies induced by these constraints, or they need to optimally utilise the available computation and communication resources. In this thesis, methodologies for the design and analysis of control algorithms with such properties are developed. Networked Control Systems: In the first part of the thesis, so-called networked control systems (NCSs) are studied. The control algorithms studied in this part of the thesis can be seen as conventional sampled-data controllers that need to be robust against the artefacts introduced by using a finite bandwidth communication channel. The network-induced phenomena that are considered in this thesis are time-varying transmission intervals, time-varying delays, packet dropouts and communication constraints. The latter phenomenon causes that not all sensor and actuator data can be transmitted simultaneously and, therefore, a scheduling protocol is needed to orchestrate when to transmit what data over the network. To analyse the stability of the NCSs, a discrete-time modelling framework is presented and, in particular, two cases are considered: in the first case, the transmission intervals and delays are assumed to be upper and lower bounded, and in the second case, they are described by a random process, satisfying a continuous joint probability distribution. Both cases are relevant. The former case requires a less detailed description of the network behaviour than the latter case, while the latter results in a less conservative stability analysis than the former. This allows to make a tradeoff between modelling accuracy (of network-induced effects) and conservatism in the stability analysis. In both cases, linear plants and controllers are considered and the NCS is modelled as a discrete-time switched linear parameter-varying system. To assess the stability of this system, novel polytopic overapproximations are developed, which allows the stability of the NCS to be studied using a finite number of linear matrix inequalities. It will be shown that this approach reduces conservatism significantly with respect to existing results in the literature and allows for studying larger classes of controllers, including discrete-time dynamical output-based controllers. Hence, the main contribution of this part of the thesis is the development of a new and general framework to analyse the stability of NCSs subject to four network-induced phenomena in a hardly conservative manner. Event-Triggered Control Systems: In the second part of the thesis, socalled event-triggered control (ETC) systems are studied. ETC is a control strategy in which the control task is executed after the occurrence of an external event, rather than the elapse of a certain period of time as in conventional periodic control. In this way, ETC can be designed to only provide control updates when needed and, thereby, to optimally utilise the available computation and communication resources. This part of the thesis consists of three main contributions in this appealing area of research. The first contribution is the extension of the existing results on ETC towards dynamical output-based feedback controllers, instead of state-feedback control, as is common in the majority of the literature on ETC. Furthermore, extensions towards decentralised event triggering are presented. These extensions are important for practical implementations of ETC, as in many control applications the full state is hardly ever available for feedback, and sensors and actuators are often physically distributed, which prohibits the use of centralised event-triggering conditions. To study the stability and the L1-performance of this ETC system, a modelling framework based on impulsive systems is developed. Furthermore, for the novel output-based decentralised event-triggering conditions that are proposed, it is shown how nonzero lower bounds on the minimum inter-event times can be guaranteed and how they can be computed. The second contribution is the proposition of the new class of periodic event-triggered control (PETC) algorithms, where the objective is to combine the benefits that, on the one hand, periodic control and, on the other hand, ETC offer. In PETC, the event-triggering condition is monitored periodically and at each sampling instant it is decided whether or not to transmit the data and to use computation resources for the control task. Such an event-triggering condition has several benefits, including the inherent existence of a minimum inter-event time, which can be tuned directly. Furthermore, the fact that the event-triggering condition is only verified at the periodic sampling times, instead of continuously, makes it possible to implement this strategy in standard time-sliced embedded software architectures. To analyse the stability and the L2-performance for these PETC systems, methodologies based on piecewiselinear systems models and impulsive system models will be provided, leading to an effective analysis framework for PETC. Finally, a novel approach to solving the codesign problem of both the feedback control algorithm and the event-triggering condition is presented. In particular, a novel way to solve the minimum attention and anytime attention control problems is proposed. In minimum attention control, the `attention' that a control task requires is minimised, and in anytime attention control, the performance under the `attention' given by a scheduler is maximised. In this context, `attention' is interpreted as the inverse of the time elapsed between two consecutive executions of a control task. The two control problems are solved by formulating them as linear programs, which can be solved efficiently in an online fashion. This offers a new and elegant way to solve both the minimum attention control problem and the anytime attention control problem in one unifying framework. The contributions presented in this thesis can form a basis for future research explorations that can eventually lead to a mature system theory for both NCSs and ETC systems, which are indispensable for the deployment of NCSs and ETC systems in a large variety of practical control applications

Networked Control Systems: The Communication Basics and Control Methodologies

As an emerging research field, networked control systems have shown the increasing importance and attracted more and more attention in the recent years. The integration of control and communication in networked control systems has made the design and analysis of such systems a great theoretical challenge for conventional control theory. Such an integration also makes the implementation of networked control systems a necessary intermediate step towards the final convergence of control, communication, and computation. We here introduce the basics of networked control systems and then describe the state-of-the-art research in this field. We hope such a brief tutorial can be useful to inspire further development of networked control systems in both theory and potential applications

Communication-protocol-based analysis and synthesis of networked systems: progress, prospects and challenges

In recent years, the communication-protocol-based synthesis and analysis issues have gained substantial research interest owing mainly to their significance in networked systems. In this work, we survey the control and filtering problems of networked systems under the effects induced by communication protocols. First, we introduce the engineering background of networked systems as well as the theoretical frameworks established to deal with the communication-protocol-based analysis and synthesis problems. Then, recent advances (especially the latest results) are reviewed on the stability analysis issue subject to protocol scheduling. Subsequently, the particular effort is devoted to presenting the latest progress on various communication-protocol-based control and filtering problems according to the characteristics of networked systems (e.g. time-varying nature, random behaviours, types of parameter uncertainties, and kinds of distributed structure). After that, we provide a systematic review of the communication-protocol-based fault diagnosis problems. Finally, some research challenges of communication-protocol-based control and filtering problems are outlined for future research