Scheduling of Event-Triggered Networked Control Systems using Timed Game Automata

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel scheduling approach for networked control systems using timed game automata to prevent communication conflicts and ensure stability, incorporating event-triggered mechanisms and pre-defined update times.

Contribution

It introduces a control synthesis framework over a network of timed game automata for conflict-free scheduling of event-triggered control systems.

Findings

Successfully avoids communication conflicts in examples

Guarantees stability of all control loops

Provides a systematic scheduling method using timed automata

Abstract

We discuss the scheduling of a set of networked control systems implemented over a shared communication network. Each control loop is described by a linear-time-invariant (LTI) system with an event-triggered implementation. We assume the network can be used by at most one control loop at any time instant and after each controller update, a pre-defined channel occupancy time elapses before the network is available. In our framework we offer the scheduler two options to avoid conflicts: using the event-triggering mechanism, where the scheduler can choose the triggering coefficient; or forcing controller updates at an earlier pre-defined time. Our objective is avoiding communication conflict while guaranteeing stability of all control loops. We formulate the original scheduling problem as a control synthesis problem over a network of timed game automata (NTGA) with a safety objective. The NTGA is obtained by taking the parallel composition of the timed game automata (TGA) associated with the network and with all control loops. The construction of TGA associated with control loops leverages recent results on the abstraction of timing models of event-triggered LTI systems. In our problem, the safety objective is to avoid that update requests from a control loop happen while the network is in use by another task. We showcase the results in some examples.