Resource-Aware Control and Dynamic Scheduling in CPS

Abstract

Recent developments in computer and communication technologies are leading to an increasingly networked and wireless world. This raises new challenging questions in the context of control for cyber-physical systems (CPS), especially when the computation, communication, energy and actuation resources (for control) of the system are limited and/or shared by multiple control tasks. These limitations obstruct the use of classical design techniques for feedback control algorithms and call for new resource-aware control paradigms. These new resource-aware control systems typically have to take both discrete decisions (which task is allowed to use the resource) and continuous decisions (which continuous control input is generated for the task). In this talk two approaches are presented to address this hybrid co-design problem. Both approaches result in control algorithms that exploit real-time measurement information available on the state of the CPS and decide dynamically on the actions to take. This leads to the situation that individual control tasks are no longer executed in classical periodic time-triggered patterns, but in aperiodic patterns with varying inter-execution times. By abandoning the periodic scheduling of control tasks, the aim is to realise better trade-offs between the overall performance of the CPS and the required resource utilisation. The approaches are illustrated by various applications. interesting challenges for the future are discussed as well.

The work of Maurice Heemels was partially supported by the Dutch Science Foundation (STW) and the Dutch Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) under the VICI grant “Wireless controls systems: A new frontier in automation” (Project number 11382).