Communication-Aware Synthesis of Safety Controller for Networked Control Systems

TL;DR

This paper presents a method for synthesizing safety controllers for networked control systems that accounts for communication imperfections and disturbances, ensuring safety through invariant sets and LMIs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework that combines controller synthesis and communication error handling without explicit channel modeling, verified via SDP.

Findings

Ensures safety despite disturbances and communication issues.

Uses ellipsoidal robust safety invariant sets and LMIs.

Validated on a cruise control case study.

Abstract

Networked control systems (NCS) are widely used in safety-critical applications, but they are often analyzed under the assumption of ideal communication channels. This work focuses on the synthesis of safety controllers for discrete-time linear systems affected by unknown disturbances operating in imperfect communication channels. The proposed method guarantees safety by constructing ellipsoidal robust safety invariant (RSI) sets and verifying their invariance through linear matrix inequalities (LMI), which are formulated and solved as semi-definite programming (SDP). In particular, our framework simultaneously considers controller synthesis and communication errors without requiring explicit modeling of the communication channel. A case study on cruise control problem demonstrates that the proposed controller ensures safety in the presence of unexpected disturbances and multiple communication imperfections simultaneously.