Distributed control methods under communication constraints with applications to sensor networks in a smart industry setting

Event-triggered distributed network control systems is an ongoing research topic. Existing solutions for distributed control have little to no scalability features in terms of both convergence time and accuracy caused by limited bandwidth. In addition, there are still major difficulties in their applications to a large-scale system under the network environment and the presence of network- induced uncertainties.

The aim of this project is to develop novel distributed control methods for large-scale systems which communicate over a limited shared medium. Emphasis will be given to resource-aware control design through the development of efficient sampling techniques, compensation methods for network imperfections, channel access method and wireless protocols for control.

Communication is an important component of these networked control systems. Understanding the interactions between control and communication components is especially important to develop systems that possess scalability features and to establish a flexible, reliable and cost- effective communication infrastructure.

Final objective is to verify concretely the effectiveness of the developed approaches and measure their performance in real life scenarios. Potential applications include cooperative control for power or transportation networks.