A Controller Synthesis Framework for Weakly-Hard Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a control synthesis framework that explicitly incorporates weakly-hard deadline constraints, improving stability and performance in real-time control systems.

Contribution

It presents a novel method for integrating weakly-hard constraints into controller design, supporting various overrun strategies and ensuring system stability.

Findings

Constraint-aware controllers outperform traditional designs.

The framework guarantees stability under weakly-hard constraints.

Validated on a Furuta pendulum benchmark.

Abstract

Deadline misses are more common in real-world systems than one may expect. The weakly-hard task model has become a standard abstraction to describe and analyze how often these misses occur, and has been especially used in control applications. Most existing control approaches check whether a controller manages to stabilize the system it controls when its implementation occasionally misses deadlines. However, they usually do not incorporate deadline-overrun knowledge during the controller synthesis process. In this paper, we present a framework that explicitly integrates weakly-hard constraints into the control design. Our method supports various overrun handling strategies and guarantees stability and performance under weakly-hard constraints. We validate the synthesized controllers on a Furuta pendulum, a representative control benchmark. The results show that constraint-aware controllers significantly outperform traditional designs, demonstrating the benefits of proactive and informed synthesis for overrun-aware real-time control.