Arbitrated Network Control Systems: A Co-Design of Control and Platform for Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract

The domain of networked control systems (NCS) has traditionally been concerned with modeling and designing distributed controllers in the presence of control message loss, varying delay and jitter. Here, the characteristics of the network are assumed to be given and the focus has largely been on the controller. In several cyber physical systems, it is possible to not only design distributed controllers, but also design both the scheduling parameters of the resident processors as well as those for the communication buses. We refer to such systems as arbitrated networked control systems (ANCS), where the parameters of the arbitration policies in the network are co-designed with the controller. Analytical methods from real-time calculus are used to design the former, and delay aware design procedures are used to determine the controller. A case study was performed on the co-design of platform and control of three quadrotors with delays. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2013.