Building blocks for co-design of controllers and implementation platforms in embedded systems
Leslie Maldonado · 2013
One of the biggest challenges in implementing feedback control applications on dis-tributed embedded platforms is the realization of required control performance while utilizing minimal computational and communication resources. Determining such tradeoffs between control performance (e.g., stability, peak overshoot, etc.) and re-source requirements is an active topic of research in the domain of cyber-physical systems (CPS). In this thesis, a setup is considered where multiple distributed con-trollers communicate using a hybrid (i.e., time- and event-triggered) communication protocol like FlexRay (which is commonly used in automotive architectures). Map-ping all control messages to time-triggered slots results in deterministic timing and hence good control performance, but time-triggered slots are more expensive. The event-triggered slots, while being less expensive, result in variable message delays and hence poor control performance. In order to tradeoff between cost and control performance, a number of recent papers proposed a switching scheme where messages are switched between time- and event-triggered slots based on the state of the plant