Event-triggered communication in networked control systems

Advanced communication technologies are deployed in many applications leading to an increasingly networked and wireless world. In the context of networked control systems, this raises many new challenging questions, especially when the communication (or other) resources for control are limited. To efficiently use the available resources it is desirable to limit the communication between (distributed) controllers, sensors and actuators to instances when the system really needs attention. In classical time-triggered control schemes, the communication and control actions are performed periodically in time (irrespective of the state of the system) rather than when the system actually needs attention. Therefore, it is of interest to consider novel control and communication paradigms that are (more) resource-aware. In this talk we discuss so-called event-triggered schemes in which control and communication actions are triggered by well-designed events involving the system's state, output or any other locally available information. We willdiscuss the main ideas and design techniques (guaranteeing stability, performance and robustness), recent advances and open problems in the field of event-triggered control for networked control systems. Applications of event-triggered communication in the area of multi-agent consensus and cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) strategies for vehicle platooning, including experimental results, will be presented.