Plug-and-play reconfiguration in networked control systems
Kontaktperson: Sven Bodenburg
Zeitraum: seit 01.01.2013
Beschreibung: The plug-and-play control concept addresses the change of a distributed controller of a networked control system at runtime. That is, based on an on-line detection of changes in the plant or modifications in the control aim, an automated reconfiguration of the control algorithm takes place and has to be implemented on the controller equipment without human interaction.
Figure 1: Structure of plug-and-play control in networked control systems
Nowadays, large-scale systems which consist of N physically interconnected subsystems Si are controlled by networked controllers as shown in Fig. 1. During the operating phase the shared network is utilised to communicate signals between the control stations Ci to take the physical coupling into account. However, future applications rely on a more advanced information exchange that is not restricted to signals but include the automated exchange of algorithms, models or trajectories (double dashed arrows in Fig. 1) during operating time. This kind of information is generally used in the design phase of a controller to face structural changes of the plant (e.g., fault occurance, adding or removing instrumentations or subsystems) or modifications in the objectives (e.g., change between velocity control and distance control in vehicle platoons). Design agents (double framed boxes in Fig. 1) are introduced to design the controller ΣCi based on the local model ΣSi and some gathered information from other design agents to satisfy the local control aim Ai.
The methodical issue of this project ist the following:
How can one achieve an assured control performance with local information
and limited information of the surrounding?