On the Value of Preview Information For Safety Control

TL;DR

This paper investigates the benefits of preview information in safety control for systems with continuous state spaces, providing theoretical insights and numerical examples to demonstrate its value.

Contribution

It offers the first analysis of preview information's impact on safety control in continuous systems, including properties for nonlinear and Brunovsky canonical form systems.

Findings

Preview information improves safety control performance.

The paper identifies strategies for optimal preview time.

Numerical examples illustrate the practical benefits of preview.

Abstract

Incorporating predictions of external inputs, which can otherwise be treated as disturbances, has been widely studied in control and computer science communities. These predictions are commonly referred to as preview in optimal control and lookahead in temporal logic synthesis. However, little work has been done for analyzing the value of preview information for safety control for systems with continuous state spaces. In this work, we start from showing general properties for discrete-time nonlinear systems with preview and strategies on how to determine a good preview time, and then we study a special class of linear systems, called systems in Brunovsky canonical form, and show special properties for this class of systems. In the end, we provide two numerical examples to further illustrate the value of preview in safety control.