A unified approach to analysis and design of networked and quantized control systems

We overview our recent work on a unifying design approach for networked control systems (NCS), quantized control systems (QCS) and their combinations that we refer to as networked and quantized control systems (NQCS). This method resembles controller emulation for sampled-data systems. In the first step, we design a controller ignoring the network and, in the second step, we implement the designed controller over the network with sufficiently fast transmissions and a given network protocol. Our results have several features: (i) they apply to general nonlinear systems; (ii) we obtain explicit (often non-conservative) bounds on the maximal allowable transmission interval that guarantee stability; (iii) and we show that this approach is valid for a wide range of network scheduling protocols. This provides a flexible framework for design of NCS, QCS and NQCS that is amenable to various extensions and modifications, such as a treatment of dropouts and stochastic protocols, combined controller/protocol design for linear plants, and so on.