No Arabic abstract
Despite rapid evolution, embedded computing systems increasingly feature resource constraints and workload uncertainties. To achieve much better system performance in unpredictable environments than traditional design approaches, a novel methodology, control-scheduling codesign, is emerging in the context of integrating feedback control and real-time computing. The aim of this work is to provide a better understanding of this emerging methodology and to spark new interests and developments in both the control and computer science communities. The state of the art of control-scheduling codesign is captured. Relevant research efforts in the literature are discussed under two categories, i.e., control of computing systems and codesign for control systems. Critical open research issues on integrating control and computing are also outlined.
Many embedded real-time control systems suffer from resource constraints and dynamic workload variations. Although optimal feedback scheduling schemes are in principle capable of maximizing the overall control performance of multitasking control systems, most of them induce excessively large computational overheads associated with the mathematical optimization routines involved and hence are not directly applicable to practical systems. To optimize the overall control performance while minimizing the overhead of feedback scheduling, this paper proposes an efficient feedback scheduling scheme based on feedforward neural networks. Using the optimal solutions obtained offline by mathematical optimization methods, a back-propagation (BP) neural network is designed to adapt online the sampling periods of concurrent control tasks with respect to changes in computing resource availability. Numerical simulation results show that the proposed scheme can reduce the computational overhead significantly while delivering almost the same overall control performance as compared to optimal feedback scheduling.
The quality of control (QoC) of a resource-constrained embedded control system may be jeopardized in dynamic environments with variable workload. This gives rise to the increasing demand of co-design of control and scheduling. To deal with uncertainties in resource availability, a fuzzy feedback scheduling (FFS) scheme is proposed in this paper. Within the framework of feedback scheduling, the sampling periods of control loops are dynamically adjusted using the fuzzy control technique. The feedback scheduler provides QoC guarantees in dynamic environments through maintaining the CPU utilization at a desired level. The framework and design methodology of the proposed FFS scheme are described in detail. A simplified mobile robot target tracking system is investigated as a case study to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed FFS scheme. The scheme is independent of task execution times, robust to measurement noises, and easy to implement, while incurring only a small overhead.
Dynamic voltage scaling (DVS) is one of the most effective techniques for reducing energy consumption in embedded and real-time systems. However, traditional DVS algorithms have inherent limitations on their capability in energy saving since they rarely take into account the actual application requirements and often exploit fixed timing constraints of real-time tasks. Taking advantage of application adaptation, an enhanced energy-aware feedback scheduling (EEAFS) scheme is proposed, which integrates feedback scheduling with DVS. To achieve further reduction in energy consumption over pure DVS while not jeopardizing the quality of control, the sampling period of each control loop is adapted to its actual control performance, thus exploring flexible timing constraints on control tasks. Extensive simulation results are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of EEAFS under different scenarios. Compared with the optimal pure DVS scheme, EEAFS saves much more energy while yielding comparable control performance.
The use of persistently exciting data has recently been popularized in the context of data-driven analysis and control. Such data have been used to assess system theoretic properties and to construct control laws, without using a system model. Persistency of excitation is a strong condition that also allows unique identification of the underlying dynamical system from the data within a given model class. In this paper, we develop a new framework in order to work with data that are not necessarily persistently exciting. Within this framework, we investigate necessary and sufficient conditions on the informativity of data for several data-driven analysis and control problems. For certain analysis and design problems, our results reveal that persistency of excitation is not necessary. In fact, in these cases data-driven analysis/control is possible while the combination of (unique) system identification and model-based control is not. For certain other control problems, our results justify the use of persistently exciting data as data-driven control is possible only with data that are informative for system identification.
We present an algorithm for controlling and scheduling multiple linear time-invariant processes on a shared bandwidth limited communication network using adaptive sampling intervals. The controller is centralized and computes at every sampling instant not only the new control command for a process, but also decides the time interval to wait until taking the next sample. The approach relies on model predictive control ideas, where the cost function penalizes the state and control effort as well as the time interval until the next sample is taken. The latter is introduced in order to generate an adaptive sampling scheme for the overall system such that the sampling time increases as the norm of the system state goes to zero. The paper presents a method for synthesizing such a predictive controller and gives explicit sufficient conditions for when it is stabilizing. Further explicit conditions are given which guarantee conflict free transmissions on the network. It is shown that the optimization problem may be solved off-line and that the controller can be implemented as a lookup table of state feedback gains. Simulation studies which compare the proposed algorithm to periodic sampling illustrate potential performance gains.