CoCPN: Cooperative Cyber Physical Networking

• Applicants: Professor Dr.-Ing. Uwe D. Hanebeck; Professorin Dr. Martina Zitterbart
• Subject Area: Security and Dependability, Operating-, Communication- and Distributed Systems ; Automation, Mechatronics, Control Systems, Intelligent Technical Systems, Robotics
• Term: from 2016 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 315021670

The goal of the proposed project CoCPN is to investigate a novel cooperative approach for an integrated operation of control systems and communication system. We envision that both, the control system as well as the communication system can react adaptively to changes in the current situation. The so called CoCPN-translator couples both systems and translates control requirements into communication properties and vice versa. From the control system side, we employ a decentralized approach to locally approximately solve the global problem of optimizing the behavior of all control loops, connected by the communication system. We apply an event-based approach to adjust the communication demand. The non-deterministic properties of the communication system are taken into account by a sequence-based approach. We study assumed time-invariant communication properties, as well as time-varying communication properties. The problem induced by the first is solved by modelling the system as a Markov Jump Linear System and derive an optimal linear controller. The latter invokes a nonconvex optimization problem and is modelled as general Stochastic Hybrid System (SHS). The optimization will be studied by cost and policy approximation strategies and by employing a scenario-based approach.Regarding the network we assume that mixed CPS and non-CPS traffic needs to be served. Therefore, we apply traffic differentiation, which in order to be effective needs to be supported by an admission control. For traffic management, we follow a mixed centralized and de-centralized approach. A so-called observer has an approximate view on a wireless domain and, thus, can provide suited routes that then will be used via source routing. In order to properly deal with competing traffic in the network, we will investigate a mechanism four congestion control that utilizes knowledge from the network and will be tailored to event-based traffic instead of traffic streams as usually seen in the Internet. As a result CoCPN should provide a flexible framework for cyber physical networks that can cope with different types of traffic, does not need network overprovisioning, and the control loop has looser real-time requirements regarding the communication system.

• DFG Programme: Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1914: Cyber-Physical Networking (CPN)