Performance Regulation via Integral Control in a Class of Stochastic Discrete Event Dynamic Systems

This paper presents a performance-regulation method for a class of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems (DEDS). The main idea is to use an integral controller with a variable gain, adaptively computed so as to guarantee effective output-tracking of a given reference value. The computation of the gain is based on the Infinitesimal Perturbation Analysis (IPA) gradient of the plant function with respect to the control variable, and the resultant tracking can be quite robust with respect to modeling inaccuracies and gradient-estimation errors. The proposed technique is tested on two examples concerning the regulation of the loss rate in a queue, and of inventory levels in a manufacturing-system represented by a Petri net. The results suggest its potential efficacy for a broader class of DEDS.