Stochastic adaptive event-triggered control and network scheduling protocol co-design for distributed networked systems

In a distributed `networked control system´ (NCS), multiple physical systems or agents are connected to their corresponding controllers through a shared packet-switched communication network. For such distributed NCS, periodic sampled controller design is unsuitable to handle packet-switched closed-loop control systems and a novel stochastic optimal adaptive event-sampled controller scheme is proposed in the application layer for each physical system or agent expressed as an uncertain linear dynamic system. Lyapunov stability analysis will be utilised to derive the event trigger condition. In addition, a network scheduling protocol is also required for such NCS. Traditional network scheduling protocols are unsuitable for such NCS since the behaviour of the physical systems is disregarded during the protocol design. Therefore in this study, a novel distributed network scheduling protocol via cross-layer approach is developed to improve the performance of distributed NCS by minimising an overall system cost function which consists of the information collected from both the event-triggered controller for each physical system in the application layer and the distributed scheduling protocol from the network layer. It will be demonstrated that the proposed co-design approach will not only allocate the network resources efficiently but also it will improve the performance of the overall distributed NCS. Simulation results are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed cross-layer co-design.