Scheduling and Control Co-Design for Control Systems under Computational Constraints

A prediction-based approach is proposed for control systems with limited and time-varying computational resources. The limited and time-varying computational resources can make the control system run in an open-loop fashion which may severely degrade the system performance or even destabilize the system. This issue is dealt with by producing more than one forward control predictions when abundant computational resources are available, and then using these forward control predictions to close the system when the computational resources are insufficient to calculate real-time control signal. This achievement is made without additional requirement for the computational resources and can be regarded as a useful completion of the scheduling algorithms. With a controller designed using a modified model predictive control method, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is successfully illustrated by a numerical example.