Adaptive regulator for networked control systems: MATLAB and true time implementation

Networked Control Systems (NCSs) employ digital network for transmitting control and monitoring information among system components. Control information over digital network may be delayed due to transmission and this can adversely affect the control performance. To achieve desired performance in the presence of delays the controller needs to modify its gains based on the channel delay. In this paper, we propose a simple adaptive regulator that uses the first order approximation for computing the controller gains based on prior knowledge of channel delays from experiments. Simulation results indicate that the adaptive regulator performs well even when we model the delay via Gaussian distribution. Delay samples obtained from MODBUS over TCP/IP and data-networks are used to illustrate the performance of the controller. The controller is implemented in True Time to illustrate its real-time performance.