Networked Control Systems with Intermittent Feedback

This book brings an overview of the necessary notions related to Lp-stability, impulsive delayed systems, switched systems, approximate dynamic programming, reinforcement learning, Markov processes, ergodicity, and scheduling protocols, followed by some realistic applications and engineering problems. Each of the eight chapters is written and organized to be as self-contained as possible through introductory sections tailored to provide the motivation and essential background of the theories required to develop selected applications and solve engineering problems of interest. The coherent and versatile framework presented by this book can be applied to various settings.

Networked Control Systems (NCSs) are spatially distributed systems for which the communication between sensors, actuators and controllers is realized by a shared (wired or wireless) communication network. NCSs offer several advantages, such as reduced installation and maintenance costs, as well as greater flexibility, over conventional control systems in which parts of control loops exchange information via dedicated point-to-point connections. The principal goal of this book is to present a coherent and versatile framework applicable to various settings investigated by the authors over the last several years. This framework is applicable to nonlinear time-varying dynamic plants and controllers with delayed dynamics; a large class of static, dynamic, probabilistic and priority-oriented scheduling protocols; delayed, noisy, lossy and intermittent information exchange; decentralized control problems of heterogeneous agents with time-varying directed (not necessarily balanced) communication topologies; state- and output-feedback; off-line and on-line intermittent feedback; optimal intermittent feedback through Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) and Reinforcement Learning (RL); and control systems with exogenous disturbances and modeling uncertainties.