A scheduling algorithm for networked control systems

This paper deals with the design of scheduling logics for Networked Control Systems (NCSs) whose shared communication networks have limited capacity. We assume that among $N$ plants, only $M\:(< N)$ plants can communicate with their controllers at any time instant. We present an algorithm to allocate the network to the plants periodically such that stability of each plant is preserved. The main apparatus for our analysis is a switched systems representation of the individual plants in an NCS. We rely on multiple Lyapunov-like functions and graph-theoretic arguments to design our scheduling logics. The set of results presented in this paper is a continuous-time counterpart of the results proposed in [15]. We present a set of numerical experiments to demonstrate the performance of our techniques.