Control for networked control systems with dynamically correlated communication constraints and its applications

Abstract This paper focuses on optimal control and stabilization for networked control systems (NCSs) subject to dynamically correlated communication constraints including traffic‐correlated delays, packet dropouts, and input delay. Different from the traditional stationary delays and packet dropouts of NCSs, the considered random delays and dropouts are correlated with the real‐time network traffic loads, making their statistical characteristics time varying rather than fixed. Moreover, this work explicitly accounts for noisy sensor measurements in the transmission process and incorporates input delay in the controller‐to‐actuator channel, which are critical practical factors often overlooked in conventional static constraint‐based analyses. The contributions are twofolds: Firstly, for the finite‐horizon case, the statistic characteristic of the traffic‐correlated delays and packet losses are derived, and the optimal estimator is presented. By applying the obtained results and dynamic programming method, the optimal controller is derived. Secondly, for the infinite‐horizon case, a necessary and sufficient condition of the stabilization for the system without additive noise is obtained. Subsequently, the sufficient condition of the boundedness for the system with additive noise is given. Numerical simulations are shown to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method using the UAV system.