Distributed control and communication in Cyber-physical Systems

Nowadays, there is a trend to build modern infrastructures as large-scale networks, possibly geographically distributed, where multiple computational and physical elements interact with one       another. The goal is to tie a global objective with distributed assets, thus allowing for more flexibility in terms of management, coordination and re-engineering. Due to the tight conjoining    of and coordination between computational and physical resources, these infrastructures are referred to as Cyber-Physical Systems (CPSs). Many CPSs such as electric power distribution, transportation and water supply systems are safety-critical. Because of this, in 2009, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) has identified them as a key area of research.

S tabilization/coordination of large-scale networks through decentralized and distributed control architectures has attracted considerable interest within both the scientific and engineering communities. However, most of the solutions considered so far do not take network-induced constraints into account. In fact, the assumption underlying the majority of these control architectures is that the information exchange among the various control units is continuous, thus ignoring computation and communication limitations that the network imposes (such as limited bandwidth, finite data/sampling rate). To realize the full potential of CPSs, these control architectures must be re-designed, embracing physical dynamics, computation and networking in a unified way.

The aim of this project is to investigate general design methodologies for decentralized and distributed control architectures in which network constraints are explicitly taken into account.

Projectleader

Prof.dr. C. de Persis, dr. Pietro Tesi

PhD student

Danial Senejohnny

Contact information