Networked Control

Emerging networked control systems such as robotics, smart energy grids, sensor networks, and autonomous vehicular systems are all characterized by multiple feedback control loops that are closed over a communication channel. The communication infrastructure is shared among those feedback control loops and potentially other applications. This poses novel challenges for the communication and control system design to support such coupled systems with stringent real-time requirements.

Networked Control Systems are inherently very complex to be analyzed due to, first, their large scale, and second because of couplings between local control loops resulting from either physical interconnections or shared communication medium. To take these challenges into account, there has been a shift of paradigm from classical centralized control to distributed control. The employment of distributed control in such systems is motivated by: splitting computational load between distributed entities, decreasing the amount of communication exchange,  information privacy, robustness against single point of failure, geographical distribution of computing resources and limited computational power of existing devices. Thus, our research focuses on developing novel concepts of distributed control for networked and cyber physical systems such that the real time requirements of both control systems and the communication system are satisfied.

Related projects:

• BMBF Research Hub: 6G-Life
• DFG-SPP 1914 - Cyber-physical Networking