Deployment Architectures for Cyber-Physical Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper explores various deployment architectures for cyber-physical control systems, bridging the gap between controller synthesis and practical deployment by comparing centralized and distributed approaches.

Contribution

It introduces four deployment architectures based on the system level synthesis framework, including a new realization for open-loop stable systems, and analyzes their trade-offs.

Findings

Distributed architectures reduce communication overhead.

Centralized architecture offers higher robustness.

Trade-offs involve robustness, memory, and computation complexity.

Abstract

We consider the problem of how to deploy a controller to a (networked) cyber-physical system (CPS). Controlling a CPS is an involved task, and synthesizing a controller to respect sensing, actuation, and communication constraints is only part of the challenge. In addition to controller synthesis, one should also consider how the controller will work in the CPS. Put another way, the cyber layer and its interaction with the physical layer need to be taken into account. In this work, we aim to bridge the gap between theoretical controller synthesis and practical CPS deployment. We adopt the system level synthesis (SLS) framework to synthesize a state-feedback controller and provide a deployment architecture for the standard SLS controller. Furthermore, we derive a new controller realization for open-loop stable systems and introduce four different architectures for deployment, ranging from fully centralized to fully distributed. Finally, we compare the trade-offs among them in terms of robustness, memory, computation, and communication overhead.