Self-triggered and team-triggered control of networked cyber-physical systems

This chapter describes triggered control approaches for the coordination of networked cyberphysical systems. Given the coverage of the other chapters of this book, our focus is on selftriggered control and a novel approach we term team-triggered control. The basic idea behind triggered approaches for controlled dynamical systems is to opportunistically select when to execute certain actions (e.g., update the actuation signal, sense some data, communicate some information) in order to efficiently perform various control tasks. Such approaches trade computation for sensing, actuation, or communication effort and give rise to real-time controllers that do not need to perform these actions continuously, or even periodically, in order for the system to function according to a desired level of performance. Triggered approaches for control become even more relevant in the context of networked cyber-physical systems, where computation, actuation, sensing and communication capabilities might not be collocated. The successful operation of networked systems critically relies on the acquisition and transmission of information across different subsystems, which adds an additional layer of complexity for controller design and analysis. In fact, a given triggered controller might be implementable over some networks and not over others, depending on the requirements imposed by the triggers on the information flow across the individual subsystems. In event-triggered control, the focus is on detecting events during the system execution that are relevant from the point of view of task completion in order to trigger appropriate actions.