Automated Synthesis of Networked Control Systems

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Majid Zamani
• Subject Area: Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics
• Term: from 2015 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271965822

Networked control systems (NCSs) are feedback control systems in which the communication between sensors, controllers, and actuators is supported by a shared communication channel that is subject to numerous non-idealities including: variable communication delays, variable sampling/transmission intervals, quantization errors, packet losses, limited bandwidth, and other communication constraints. NCSs have received significant attention within the scientific and industrial communities in the past two decades because of their high architectural flexibility and low installation and maintenance costs. For example, automotive architectures in high-end cars today consist of almost 100 electronic control units (ECUs) connected by a variety of communication channels like CAN, FlexRay, and Ethernet. Given such a distributed and heterogeneous architecture, the non-idealities caused by the communication channels can result in a significant deviation in control performance in such applications.This research proposal aims to develop an innovative design process, in which the embedded control software for plants in NCSs is synthesized from high-level correctness requirements in a push-button and formal manner. Requirements for modern NCS applications go beyond conventional properties in control theory (e.g. stability) and include temporal logic specifications such as properties expressed as linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae or as automata on infinite strings. In particular, we investigate correct-by-construction controller synthesis of temporal logic specifications for NCSs by constructively deriving symbolic abstractions of NCSs, while considering the network non-idealities simultaneously. Finally, we provide a front-end toolbox taking a model of the plant, described by an ordinary differential (or difference) equation, or its corresponding symbolic model, the network properties, and a logic specification as inputs and providing automatically a provably correct controller as executable C/C++ code as an output enforcing the given specification on the plant in the NCS. In addition, we provide an interface between our toolbox and Matlab or OMNet++ (a well-known network simulator) for realistic simulations of the plants and the network imperfections.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants