Cyber-physical systems will soon become ubiquitous. One of the major challenges that such systems pose is that the control algorithms that modulate the interaction with the physical world have traditionally assumed availability of unlimited computational resources. However, in cyber-physical systems, control tasks are executed on shared processors that can only provide time-varying and uncertain computational resources. Moreover, the real-time scheduling of control tasks provides new difficulties in this context given the sensitivity of control performance to jitter and latency caused by the time varying availability of computational resources. These are new problems that reside at the interface between control algorithms and real-time scheduling policies. This research provides a new joint control and task scheduling approach that maintaining a guaranteed control performance under time-varying processor availability while optimally utilizing the available computational resources. More specifically, this project aims at the design of novel anytime receding horizon control algorithms that provide progressively better performance as more computational time is provided and redistribute the available computational resources online based on the control performance and on the quality of service of other real-time tasks. By addressing a fundamental bottleneck in the design of cyber-physical systems, this project directly impacts the society in profound ways. New classes of applications of receding horizon control in real-time environments, such as networked vision-based control and complex SCADA systems will become possible with economic and societal benefits. This project also focuses attention at the challenges at the intersection of control and real-time computation, and thus fosters collaboration between researchers in these two communities, also leading to new educational material.
