Seminar Details
2020-11-03 (14h) : The quest to schedule event-based controllers. An approach via formal abstractions.
At MS Teams
Organized by Mathematical Engineering
Speaker :
Manuel Mazo Jr. (TU Delft)
Abstract :
Modern control systems are often implemented as networked systems, in which bandwidth of a communication medium is shared among a number of applications. Furthermore, often the act of communicating also has an energy impact on the system infrastructure, e.g. in the case of wireless control systems. In the last decade the study of controller implementation strategies aiming at reducing the communication footprint, to save bandwidth (and energy), has thus attracted great attention. Arguably, one of the most promising implementation paradigms in the literature is that of event-triggered control (ETC), in which communications are triggered by the state of the plant itself, which makes the system communicate only when necessary to retain stability of the closed-loop.
ETC implementations, while reducing drastically the amount of required bandwidth, result in aperiodic transmissions whose time of occurrence are highly unpredictable, leading to difficulties for scheduling such systems. Such difficulties usually imply that the freed bandwidth may not be reusable by other (real-time) applications, and that energy savings may be completely lost, thus rendering ETC schemes inefficient.
In this talk I describe a plan to the ETC scheduling problem through the construction of timed-automata models for the ETC systems' traffic. I start introducing ETC and describing the difficulty of scheduling such systems employing a control theoretic perspective. Next, I introduce the notion of model abstraction we employ to make the scheduling problem solvable. Two approaches to the construction of this abstractions are described and how the resulting models can be employed to solve scheduling problems. The talk finalizes going briefly over our most recent advances, the difficulties, and possible opportunities for future research in this field.