Related papers: A Contract Theory for Layered Control Architecture…
This paper focuses on the need for a rigorous theory of layered control architectures (LCAs) for complex engineered and natural systems, such as power systems, communication networks, autonomous robotics, bacteria, and human sensorimotor…
Designing large-scale control systems to satisfy complex specifications is hard in practice, as most formal methods are limited to systems of modest size. Contract theory has been proposed as a modular alternative to formal methods in…
This paper introduces assume/guarantee contracts on continuous-time control systems, hereby extending contract theories for discrete systems to certain new model classes and specifications. Contracts are regarded as formal characterizations…
We consider the problem of reasoning about networked and layered control systems using assume-guarantee specifications. As these systems are formed by the interconnection of components that operate under various clocks, we introduce a new…
Architectural styles and patterns play an important role in software engineering. One of the most known ones is the layered architecture style. However, this style is usually only stated informally, which may cause problems such as…
Modern engineering systems include many components of different types and functions. Verifying that these systems satisfy given specifications can be an arduous task, as most formal verification methods are limited to systems of moderate…
Today's control systems are often characterized by modularity and safety requirements to handle complexity, resulting in hierarchical control structures. Although hierarchical model predictive control offers favorable properties, achieving…
Industrial cyber-infrastructure is normally a multilayered architecture. The purpose of the layered architecture is to hide complexity and allow independent evolution of the layers. In this paper, we argue that this traditional strict…
Layered control architectures have been a standard paradigm for efficiently managing complex constrained systems. A typical architecture consists of: i) a higher layer, where a low-frequency planner controls a simple model of the system,…
To design control strategies that predictably manipulate a system's behavior, it is first necessary to understand how the system's structure relates to its response. Many complex systems can be represented as multilayer networks whose…
Layered control is essential for managing complexity in large-scale systems, employing progressively coarser models at higher layers. While significant advances have been made for fully observable systems, the theoretical foundations of…
Contract-based design is a promising methodology for taming the complexity of developing sophisticated systems. A formal contract distinguishes between assumptions, which are constraints that the designer of a component puts on the…
This paper develops a control-theoretic framework for analyzing agentic systems embedded within feedback control loops, where an AI agent may adapt controller parameters, select among control strategies, invoke external tools, reconfigure…
Contract theories have been proposed to formally support distributed and decentralized system design while ensuring safe system integration. In this paper we propose hypercontracts, a generic model with a richer structure for its underlying…
The fundamental concept of applying the system methodology to network analysis declares that network architecture should take into account services and applications which this network provides and supports. This work introduces a formal…
This paper is concerned with the problem of controlling a system of constrained dynamic subsystems in a way that balances the performance degradation of decentralized control with the practical cost of centralized control. We propose a…
The controllability of a network is a theoretical problem of relevance in a variety of contexts ranging from financial markets to the brain. Until now, network controllability has been characterized only on isolated networks, while the vast…
We propose a methodology that exploits the contract formalism to characterize the continuous-time safety control problem, which is often difficult to address, in terms of a discrete-time one, for which numerous efficient solution scheme…
The paradigm of layered networks is used to describe many real-world systems -- from biological networks, to social organizations and transportation systems. Recently there has been much progress in understanding the general properties of…
This paper introduces a novel data-driven hierarchical control scheme for managing a fleet of nonlinear, capacity-constrained autonomous agents in an iterative environment. We propose a control framework consisting of a high-level dynamic…