A control approach for cooperative sharing of network resources in cyber-physical systems

This paper introduces an approach to cooperatively control the utilization of network resources, which are shared by several control loops, in cyber-physical systems without fixed scheduling schemes. Main goal of the proposed approach is to achieve a fair balancing with regards to the performance of each control loop such that the overall performance of the CPS is maximized. To maintain a loose coupling between the underlying communication system and the control loops on top, the approach relies on a data exchange between the control and the communication domain. This data exchange is carried out by a translator component embedded between each control loop and the communication system. Motivated by previous results, this data exchange is backed up by the principle of event-based control and used to restate the problem of balancing the network resources in terms of a control problem that resembles the popular consensus problem in multi-agent systems. We illustrate the applicability of the proposed approach by means of the task of simultaneously stabilizing two inverted pendulums over a shared medium.