Co-design Approaches to Dependable Networked Control Systems

Chapter 1

Preliminary Notions and State of the Art 1

1.1. Overview

Basically, co-design needs to share, compare, and gather the knowledge and perspectives brought by the stakeholders involved in the design process. Indeed, the design of safe networked control systems involves many basic methodologies and technologies. The essential methodologies involved here are feedback control, real-time scheduling, fault detection and isolation (FDI), filtering and identification, networking protocols, and QoS metrics: each of them relies on theoretic concepts and specific domains of applied mathematics such as optimization and information theory. On the other hand, these concepts are implemented via various technologies and devices, for example, involving mechanical or chemical engineering, continuous and digital electronics and software engineering.

These basic domains are explained in existing literature; hence, this chapter is not meant to give an exhaustive overview of all the methodologies and technologies used further in the book. This book is also not meant to provide an exhaustive state of the art nor to be a definitive treatise on the open topic of safe NCS; it is aimed at recording and disseminating the experience gathered by the authors during the joint SAFENECS academic research project. The team brought together people from different horizons, with basic backgrounds in control or computer science, and expertise in various domains and technologies such as digital control design, ...