Scheduling-and-Control Codesign for a Collection of Networked Control Systems With Uncertain Delays

This paper is concerned with the simultaneous stabilization of a collection of continuous-time linear time-invariant (LTI) plants whose feedback-control loops are closed via a shared digital communication network. Because of the limitation of communication capacity, only a limited number of controller-plant connections can be accommodated at any time instant. Therefore, it is necessary to carefully determine a scheduling policy so as to achieve a simultaneous stabilization for all these control loops. A sufficient condition on the existence of such a scheduling policy is presented for a collection of networked LTI systems with sampled-data controllers and uncertain network-induced delays. The proof for the schedulability condition is in a constructive way, which can also serve as a systematic method to design a scheduling policy. Finally, a scheduling-and-feedback-control codesign procedure is proposed for the simultaneous stabilization of the collection of networked LTI systems, and the effectiveness of the proposed codesign procedure is demonstrated with simulation results.