Control of cyber-physical systems

Along with evolution of engineering applications that result in more and more complex systems, computers need to interact with the physical environment in more complicated forms. This evolution extends the traditional automatic control problems in which the principal components are the plant and the controller to systems analysis and design problems that involve more subsystems with possibly very different natures. Two important instances of such subsystems that may appear in cyber-physical systems are:
  • Communication links with limitations and imperfections that can affect the overall system performance. The resulting category of systems is known as the class of networked control systems.
  • Subsystems with discrete-valued variables like ON/OFF devices or logical functions implemented in some computing elements. The result falls in the category of hybrid systems.