Control-quality driven design of cyber-physical systems with robustness guarantees

Many cyber-physical systems comprise several control applications sharing communication and computation resources. The design of such systems requires special attention due to the complex timing behavior that can lead to poor control quality or even instability. The two main requirements of control applications are: (1) robustness and, in particular, stability and (2) high control quality. Although it is essential to guarantee stability and provide a certain degree of robustness even in the worst-case scenario, a design procedure which merely takes the worst-case scenario into consideration can lead to a poor expected (average-case) control quality, since the design is solely tuned to a scenario that occurs very rarely. On the other hand, considering only the expected quality of control does not necessarily provide robustness and stability in the worst-case. Therefore, both the robustness and the expected control quality should be taken into account in the design process. This paper presents an efficient and integrated approach for designing high-quality cyber-physical systems with robustness guarantees.