Scheduling of over-actuated networked control systems

Abstract

We investigate the scenario where an over-actuated plant is controlled over a network. We concentrate on the effect of two network-induced phenomena: varying transmission intervals and scheduling, in the sense that only one of the actuators receives new data at each transmission instant. We present an emulation-based solution for the controller design, i.e., the controller is first designed to stabilize the origin of the plant ignoring the network and second, the packet-based network is taken into account and conditions on the maximum allowable transmission interval (MATI) and the scheduling protocol are given to preserve the stability of the closed-loop system. Our results are tailored to over-actuated plants leading to significant improvements compared to applying off-the-shelf results available in the literature. In particular, a new model is derived and new conditions on the scheduling protocol are given, which lead to a two-measure stability property for the networked control system. We illustrate how new classes of scheduling protocols can be derived by exploiting over-actuation, which leads to larger MATI bounds compared to applying existing results, as shown on a numerical example.