Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Traditional industrial facilities are monitored and controlled through industrial computers, in which time-triggered operations are the norm. Digital control is the paradigm for such time-triggered systems. This digital control paradigm uses a fundamental assumption that all signals and systems are sampled periodically in time. However, this assumption is no longer valid in modern industrial systems for two reasons. First, integrating new communication and computing technologies generates a new class of systems called cyber-physical systems, in which network protocols and real-time computer algorithms evolve by events and are event-triggered. Second, most existing industrial facilities are still operated by human operators through alarm monitoring systems. Could industrial plants be fully automated without the intervention of operators at all? This would require incorporating alarm systems with control systems; but alarm systems are event-triggered, violating the periodicity assumption. The main research objective is to develop a unified event-triggered paradigm for the analysis and design of cyber-physical control systems. Such systems present tremendous challenges for control engineers and designers because of the interactions among control, computation, and communication components, and the inclusion of both time- and event-triggered mechanism. The proposed research program covers modeling, state estimation, and control design of time- and event-triggered systems, integration of control and alarm systems, and studying the properties of importance for both control and monitoring purposes, such as stability, control performance, communication and computing resource usage, fault detection accuracy, and fault diagnosis capabilities. The research problems are complex and challenging, requiring a great deal of innovation and originality to uncover new solutions which are effective and efficient. Since event-triggered closed-loop systems are in general time-varying and nonlinear, traditional frequency-domain based methods are not applicable. The planned approach would be in general time-domain, using state-space models for continuous-time processes, time-based equations for time- and event-triggered operations, Lyapunov-based techniques for closed-loop stability analysis, and optimization tools for analysis and design solutions. The proposed research program targets knowledge advance in the field of Control Systems, which is relevant to Electrical, Chemical, and Mechanical Engineering. The novelty and expected significance are as follows: The program would address major challenges facing the control systems community, impacting both theory and practice; the research would provide control engineers and practitioners with new tools for analysis and synthesis of networked control systems and cyber-physical systems; finally, the program would benefit Canadian industry by engaging in technology- and industry-relevant research student training.