Decentralized event-based control: Stability analysis and experimental evaluation

Event-based control aims at reducing the amount of information which is communicated between sensors, actuators and controllers in a networked control system. The feedback link is only closed at times at which an event indicates the need for an information update to retain a desired performance. Between consecutive event times the control loop acts as a continuous system, whereas at the event times it performs a state jump. Thus, the event-based control loop belongs to the class of hybrid dynamical systems. In this paper a new method for decentralized event-based control is proposed. Two methods are presented for the stability analysis of the decentralized event-based state feedback control of physically interconnected systems. The comparison principle leads to a stability criterion that provides an upper bound for the coupling strength for which the stability of the uncoupled event-based control loops implies ultimate boundedness of the interconnected event-based system. It is shown that ultimate boundedness of the event-based state-feedback loop is implied by the asymptotic stability of the continuous state-feedback system. Furthermore, it is explained how the number of events can be reduced by estimating the interconnection signals between the subsystems and two different estimation methods are proposed. The derived methods are demonstrated for a thermofluid process by simulation and experiments.