Goal-Oriented State Information Compression for Linear Dynamical System Control

TL;DR

This paper develops a method for optimally allocating limited communication resources in linear dynamical systems to minimize control performance loss, providing a closed-form solution and practical guidelines.

Contribution

It introduces a novel resource allocation policy for compressed state information in control systems, with a closed-form solution and improved performance over uniform policies.

Findings

Optimal resource allocation policy derived in closed-form

Simulation shows significant performance gains

Guidelines for communication timing and method

Abstract

In this paper, we consider controlled linear dynamical systems in which the controller has only access to a compressed version of the system state. The technical problem we investigate is that of allocating compression resources over time such that the control performance degradation induced by compression is minimized. This can be formulated as an optimization problem to find the optimal resource allocation policy. Under mild assumptions, this optimization problem can be proved to have the same well-known structure as in [1], allowing the optimal resource allocation policy to be determined in closed-form. The obtained insights behind the optimal policy provide clear guidelines on the issue of "when to communicate" and "how to communicate" in dynamical systems with restricted communication resources. The obtained simulation results confirm the efficiency of the proposed allocation policy and illustrate the gain over the widely used uniform rate allocation policy.