Distributed networked control systems: A brief overview

Abstract

Distributed networked control systems have attracted intense attention from both academia and industry due to the multidisciplinary nature among the areas of communication networks, computer science and control. With ever-increasing research trends in these areas, it is desirable to review recent advances and to identify methodologies for distributed networked control systems. This paper presents a brief overview of such systems regarding system configurations, challenging issues and methodologies. First, networked control systems are introduced and their prevalent configurations including centralized, decentralized and distributed structures are outlined. Second, an emphasis is laid on a number of challenging issues from the analysis and synthesis of distributed networked control systems. More specifically, these challenging issues are identified through three integrated aspects: communication, computation and control. Third, different methodologies in the literature for distributed networked control systems are reviewed and categorized based on three pairs: undirected and directed graphs, fixed and time-varying topologies, and time-triggered and event-triggered mechanisms. Finally, concluding remarks are drawn and some potential research directions are suggested.