Scheduling and Robust Invariance in Networked Control Systems

In networked control systems, impairments of the communication channel can be disruptive to stability and performance. In this article, we consider the problem of scheduling the access to limited communication resources for a number of decoupled systems subject to state and input constraints, whose loops need to be closed over the network. The schedule must be designed to robustly preserve the invariance property of each system, which, in turn, guarantees constraint satisfaction. To that end, we first focus on systematic offline scheduling design to preserve robust invariance and afterward on online scheduling design with the aim of improving performance and compensating for packet losses while guaranteeing recursive schedulability.