Evaluation of Decentralized Event-Triggered Control Strategies for Cyber-Physical Systems

TL;DR

This paper evaluates decentralized event-triggered control strategies for cyber-physical systems, demonstrating significant energy savings and system lifetime extension through innovative MAC protocols and duty-cycling in a smart water network testbed.

Contribution

It introduces duty-cycling for sensing and actuation, along with two novel MAC protocols, to improve energy efficiency in decentralized event-triggered control systems.

Findings

Decentralized event-triggered control outperforms periodic control in energy savings.

Experimental results show significant system lifetime extension.

Proposed protocols effectively balance communication and energy consumption.

Abstract

Energy constraint long-range wireless sensor/ actuator based solutions are theoretically the perfect choice to support the next generation of city-scale cyber-physical systems. Traditional systems adopt periodic control which increases network congestion and actuations while burdens the energy consumption. Recent control theory studies overcome these problems by introducing aperiodic strategies, such as event trigger control. In spite of the potential savings, these strategies assume actuator continuous listening while ignoring the sensing energy costs. In this paper, we fill this gap, by enabling sensing and actuator listening duty-cycling and proposing two innovative MAC protocols for three decentralized event trigger control approaches. A laboratory experimental testbed, which emulates a smart water network, was modelled and extended to evaluate the impact of system parameters and the performance of each approach. Experimental results reveal the predominance of the decentralized event-triggered control against the classic periodic control either in terms of communication or actuation by promising significant system lifetime extension.