Sporadic Control of First-Order Linear Stochastic Systems

The standard approach in feedback control systems is to sample and control periodically. For some applications, such as networked control systems or severely energy-constrained systems, it could be advantageous to instead use event-based control schemes. Aperiodic control (that is, event-based control with no specified minimum inter-event time) of first-order stochastic systems has been investigated in previous work. In any real implementation, however, it is necessary to have a well-defined minimum inter-event time. In this paper, we explore two such sporadic control schemes for first-order linear stochastic systems and compare the achievable performance to both periodic and aperiodic control. The results indicate that sporadic control can give better performance than periodic control in terms of reduced process state variance and control action frequency.