Wireless Control Networks

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Project Overview:

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We introduce the concept of a Wireless Control Network (WCN) where the entire network itself acts as the controller - this is opposed to traditional networked control schemes where the nodes simply route information to and from a dedicated controller (perhaps performing some encoding along the way). Specifically, we formulate a simple, linear iterative strategy for each node in the network to follow, where at each time-step each node updates its internal state to be a linear combination of the states of the nodes in its neighborhood. This causes the entire network to behave as a structured linear dynamical system, with sparsity constraints imposed by the network topology.

The WCN introduces very low computational and communication overhead to the nodes in the network and allows use of simple transmission scheduling algorithms. Since the WCN does not rely on the existence of dedicated controllers and inherently captures the case of nodes exchanging values with the plant at various points in the network it can be used for plants with multiple sensing/actuation points connected to a multi-hop network. This makes WCNs suitable as a means for control of geographically distributed plants (e.g., building control, industrial process control). Furthermore, the WCN enables compositional design, where the existing wireless infrastructure can be easily extended to handle new plants that are brought online in the vicinity of the network. Finally, the utilized linear iterative scheme allows identification of malicious behavior by examining the transmissions of only a subset of the nodes in the network (provided that the network topology satisfies certain conditions).

People:

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University of Pennsylvania
Miroslav Pajic
Prof. Rahul Mangharam
Prof. George J. Pappas

University of Waterloo
Prof. Shreyas Sundaram

Papers:

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• Rahul Mangharam and Miroslav Pajic, "Distributed Control for Cyber-Physical Systems", Journal of the Indian Institute of Science, 2013. Invited paper.

• Miroslav Pajic, Rahul Mangharam, George J. Pappas, and Shreyas Sundaram,"Topological Conditions for In-Network Stabilization of Dynamical Systems", IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications, 2013.

• Fei Miao, Miroslav Pajic, Rahul Mangharam, and George J. Pappas, "Networked Realization of Discrete-Time Controllers", American Control Conference (ACC), Washington DC, 2013.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, Jerome Le Ny, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "Closing the Loop: A Simple Distributed Method for Control over Wireless Networks", 11th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Information Processing in Sensor Networks (IPSN), Beijing, China, 2012.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "Topological Conditions for Wireless Control Networks", Proc. of the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Orlando, FL, 2011.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "The Wireless Control Network: A New Approach for Control over Networks", IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2011.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "Network Synthesis for Dynamical System Stabilization", Proc. of the 45th Annual Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computers (Asilomar), Pacific Grove, CA, 2011.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "A Simple Distributed Method for Control over Wireless Networks", CPS Week Workshop on Real-Time Wireless for Industrial Applications (RealWIN), Chicago, IL, 2011.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, Jerome Le Ny, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, "The Wireless Control Network: Synthesis and Robustness", Proc. of the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Atlanta, GA, 2010.

• Shreyas Sundaram, Miroslav Pajic, Christoforos N. Hadjicostis, Rahul Mangharam and George J. Pappas, "The Wireless Control Network: Monitoring for Malicious Behavior", Proc. of the 50th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), Atlanta, GA, 2010.

Reports:

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• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, Rahul Mangharam and George J. Pappas, The Wireless Control Network: Topological Conditions for System Stabilization, Technical Report, March 2011.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, The Wireless Control Network, Techical Report, March 2010.

• Miroslav Pajic, Shreyas Sundaram, Mansimar Aneja, Vemuri Srinivas, George J. Pappas and Rahul Mangharam, Architecture for a Fully Distributed Wireless Control Network, Demonstration at IEEE/ACM CPSWeek, April 2011.

Videos:

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WCN Demo: Process-in-the-loop simulation - Distillation colum control (uncut version)

We demonstrate how a WCN can be utilized for distillation column control, a well-known process control problem. To illustrate the use of the WCN, we have utilized process-in-the-loop simulation, where the behavior of a distillation column was simulated in Simulink. The Simulink model was interfaced with an actual, physical network - used as the control network - which consists of several wireless nodes, sensors and actuators.

Stay tuned for more details...