Section: Scientific Foundations

Main Research Directions

The main objective of the project is to develop a unified control, communication, computing co-design methodology explicitly accounting for all the components involved in the system controlled over a network. This includes quantifier properties, scheduling parameters, encoder/decoder, alphabet length, bandwidth of the transmission media (wire or wireless), delays, resource allocation, jitter, etc. These components, including the control laws, should be designed so as to optimize performance/stability trade-offs resulting from the ceiling of the computing resources, the channel capacity limitations and the quality of the send/received information protocols. More informations about the main research directions of the team can be found in [1] , [3] ,[2] , [4] [5] , [6] , [7] , [8] , [9] and [10] .

In short, the project is centered along the following 3 main axes:

1. Control under Communications Constraints. One well established topic along this axis concerns the coding and control co-design. That is, the design of new code alphabets simultaneously than the design of the control law. Or equivalently, the ability of designing codes containing information pertained to the system model and the control law. The objective being the improvements of the overall closed loop performances. Besides this matter, additional improvements pertain to the field of the information theory are also in order.

2. Control under Computational resources constraints. The main objective here is the design of control loops by explicitly accounting for the network and/or the computing resources. Dynamic allocation of such resources depends on the desired controlled systems specifications. Keys aspects to be considered are: the design of controllers with variable sampling time, the robustness with respect to time uncertainties such as the input/output latencies, the global control of resources and its impact over the performance and the robustness of the system to be controlled. We aim to provide an integrated control and scheduling co-design approach [1] .

3. Controlling Complexity. Design and control of partially cooperative networked (possible also multi-agent) systems subject to communication and computational constraints. Here, a large number of entities (agents), having each its own goal share limited common resources. In this context, if there is no minimum coordination, dramatic consequences may follow, on the other hand, total coordination would be impossible because of the lack of exhaustive, reliable and synchronous information. Finally, a local network of strategies that are based on worst-case assumptions is clearly far from being realistic for a well designed system. The aim of this topic is to properly define key concepts and the relevant variables associated to the above problem (sub-system, partial objective, constraints on the exchanged data and computational resources, level of locally shared knowledge, key parameters for the central level, etc).