Efficient Utilization of Bus Idle Times in CAN-based Networked Control Systems

This paper presents a novel approach to networked control systems (NCS) analysis and design that provides increased control performance for a set of control loops that exchange control data over the Controller Area Network (CAN). This is achieved by enabling the following functionality for each control loop: first, standard periodic messaging is guaranteed to ensure stability, and second, non-periodic additional messaging is added whenever the bus is idle in such a way that the aggregated control performance for all control loops is improved. The proposed approach, named Maximum Difference (MD) policy, is computable in a distributed manner, and is practically feasible (computationally efficient and CAN-implementable). We theoretically prove that the MD policy behaves better than static strategies. Simulation results complement the theoretical derivations and show that the MD policy outperforms static, random and Largest Error First policies.