2014 IEEE International Conference on System Science ang Engineering (ICSSE)

Jnly 11-13 2014,Shanghai, China

An Introduction to Event-based Control

for Networl<ed Control Systems
Qianqian Hong, Hao Zhang*,

*Electronic and Information Engineering Department, TongJi University, Shanghai, China

E-mail: hongqianI102@163.com;zhang_hao@tongji.edu.cn
Abstract-This

paper aims at making an overview of three

event-triggered

control

and

self-triggered

control

different triggering control schemes for networked control

respectively. Many NCS control schemes so far are based

systems based on previous works, namely, time-triggered

on time-triggered communication which makes full use of

control, event-triggered control and self-triggered control .

mature data-sampled algorithm, though there are some

By referring to large amount of others' works, this paper

problems

makes a comparison and analysis of the three triggering

Time-triggered control is an original control method

schemes and introduces some new control methods based on

proposed in last century. It is easy to design and analyze

them. Transmission delay and data dropout are still two

while

serious problems in the networked control systems needing

simultaneously. So event-triggered control and self

due

leads

to

to

limited

network

unnecessary

waste

bandwidth.

of

resources

simply

triggered control methods are developed to solve this

introduced at last. Through the analysis, we can conclude

existing problem afterwards. They successfully reduce the

that event-triggered control method is most people's choice

communication and traffic load in the light of a

and have been used to solve difficult problems in many

nonuniform sampling scheme. These two control schemes

occasions.

make good trade offs between communication load and

to

be

coped

with.

Scheduling

protocols

are

closed-loop
Keywords-event-triggered control; self-triggered control;

which

achieves

the

expected

Moreover, as an extension to event-triggered control

networked control systems

1.

system

performance while occupies less communication load.

scheme, self-triggered control can predict next event time

INTRODUCTION

according to local information and it is not necessary to

Networked control systems have received certain

monitor triggering condition continuously. It needs no

attention in the past decades on account of the fact that

more hardware to monitoring the triggering condition

information

transferring

obviously. Self-triggered control is more flexible than

components

are

between

accomplished

control

through

system
network

communication rather than point-to-point wrings. The

term "Networked Control Systems" first appeared in
Gregory C. Walshs article. In recent years, the analysis
and synthesis of NCSs have been extensively studied in
many works. These networked control systems are in
service throughout the national infrastructure such as
transportation networks and the electrical power grid. A
networked control system always consists of several
components like sensors, controllers, actuators and control
plants which are physically distributed. The usage of
communication network has brought many advantages that
are reduction of costs, higher flexibility and ease of
streamlined installation while maintaining the system
performance. In the triggering control point of view, there
are three main different control methods that are
time-triggered control (periodic data-sampled control),

978-1-4799-4367-8/14/$31.00 2014 IEEE

event-triggered control when triggering an event.

It is known that the networked communication is not as
dependable as a point-to-point communication. Traffic
congestion in a networked control system may lead to
many undesired effects on system stability if severe
enough. In the initial works, many scholars investigated
the control methods for NCSs under a desired network
transmission without consideration of time-delay and
packet dropout such as [8] which made an assumption that
the triggering signal can be transmitted to the input
controller immediately in zero seconds. But in practical
systems, communication delay and data packet dropout are
the most common cases during signal transmission. Based
on the mature analysis of networked control systems,
some control model and control schemes are proposed in
[3], [9] and [18] et al..

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Tn

large unnecessary communication in the networked

section IT, a simple overview of time-triggered control is

control systems. Two classes of methods are proposed to

made since it is regarded as a basic control theory for other

cope with the existing problem. The first way is to use rate

control methods. Part ITT will make a review of

adaptation techniques where the sampling period is

event-triggered control and introduction to some novel

determined by the controlled system dynamics or the

methods proposed recently which can solve time-delay

current bandwidth conditions of the system, e.g. [ 14] and

and other serious problems effectively as well as improve

[IS]. The second method is to produce non-periodic

system performance obviously. Tn part TV, self-triggered

executions in the light of event-based data-sampled

control is introduced comparing with event-triggered

techniques introduced in the latter parts. The main goal of

reasonable usage of scheduling

these two methods is to minimize the bandwidth

protocol obeyed by different triggering schemes is also

utilization while still guarantee stability and acceptable

vital in distributed multiple networked control systems.

system performance.

control. Otherwise,

Finally, part V makes a conclusion of triggering control

Ill. EVENT-TRIGGERED CONTROL IN NcSs

schemes in networked control systems.

II.

TIME-TRIGGERED CONTROL IN NcSs

In original control theory researches, open-loop control

scheme is used to realize the control of system under the

Time-triggered control mechanism always leads to

inefficient utilization of networked resources although it
is preferred for us from the analysis and design point of
VIew.

To

mitigate

the

unnecessary

waste

of

optimizing assumption that the control system has

communication and computation resources in traditional

knowledge of initial state and system model and no

time triggered control, event-triggered control scheme has

process disturbance. But there always exists external or

been raised in last century in [ 1] which first certificated

internal disturbance in a system and open-loop control

the potential of this control mechanism to reducing the

scheme is consequently not essential for general system

communication and computation times by experiments

control. Closed-loop control mechanism is more beneficial

and emulation. Soon afterwards the analysis results are

to cope with the uncertainty problem of a system in [32].

derived in [5] which verified that it is able to reduce

Moreover, a better sampling scheme is able to reduce the

information exchange and network bandwidth occupancy

uncertainty property in a more creditable way in NCSs. So

through

event-triggered

control

comparing

with

time-triggered control scheme was proposed in last

time-triggered

century. As a traditional control method it has become the

event-triggered networked control system is showed as

control.

The

basic

structure

of

theoretic basis of event-triggered and self-triggered control

figure 1. Contrast with traditional closed-loop control

schemes, which is also called periodic data-sampled

method, event generator is added between the controlled

control. The sensors sample state data periodically at fixed

plant and controller, which determines whether the

predefined time instances and then transfer sampled

sampled-data should be transmitted or not.

signals to control plants through network communication.

:(f)/)(

A zero-order holder is necessary for time-triggered control

between the sensors and controllers which maintain the

consecutive sampling instants. Many works can be found

last

century

such

as

[33]

printed

-t....iiij ....

1990s.

However, the worst drawback of this approach is that it

makes a fixed usage of the communication bandwidth
regardless of the current network loads or changes in the
control systems. The sampling period is predefined to
maintain the performance stability under the worst
scenario with largest disturbance or traffic congestion.
There always exist a lot of resources wasted on account of

Network

Time-triggered control method is appealing for a long time

on account of its ease to analysis and designing.

Sensor

Event generator

value of input of the plant as a constant between two

m

--,
. I
If}1)(l
I

-------

Plan

Figure 1.

A.

Structure of an event-triggered networked control system

Several Typical Triggering Condition

In initial approaches, some researchers designed the

controllers

under

the

assumption

of

perfect

communication without network transmission delay and

data packet dropout and then determined the maXImum
allowable interval between two consecutive triggering

instances that ensured desired performance of closed-loop

system under a network protocol, such as Round-Robin

e(ikh) An event-based state-feedback approach is proposed

.

(RR) protocol and Try-Once-Discard (TaD). Moreover, in

in [6] which adds a control input generator between the

traditional event-triggered control the system states are

event generator and the control plant. Both generators

monitored continuously to ensure a high degree of

have a same model and update their state with the same

robustness in [ 17]. From the feedback point of view, there

value simultaneously. The former approach is based on an

are two event-triggering schemes respectively based on

assumption that all states are available to us, but when we

state-feedback control and output-feedback control. The

can't get full states information, state-feedback control is

control tasks of these two control mechanisms are both

not useful for us. Then output-feedback control is

executed only if state-dependent triggering condition is

developed by [8] based on Ref. [6]. A Lunberger observer

violated. The simplest triggering condition that often used

is added into the closed-loop system which has knowledge

in many papers can be expressed by

of observed values of system states instead of real states.

Ilx(t)- x(t I

The triggering condition can be designed depending on the

(1)

error between the observed states and event generation

wherex(t)with n dimensions in multi-agent problems or

one dimension for a single plant denotes the real time

states. An algorithm is proposed to design event-based

closed-loop control plant state, while x(t) with same

can refer to Ref. [27] for detail learning about dissipative

dimensions since x (t ) is defined as the state value of the

last triggering time.

is a predefined constant which

indicates the error between x (t) and x(t). We can design a

controller with arbitrary precision by accordingly choosing
the event threshold e . There still exist some other forms of
triggering conditions such as adaptive trigger function
depending on Lyapunov function and time-dependent
triggering function such as taking an exponentially
decreasing variable as threshold [31] et al..

observers for networked control systems in [30]. We also

control based on output-feedback which is designed for
general system.

B.

Monitoring Triggering Condition Discretely

The former control methods all need continuous

supervision of the triggering conditions to ensure the

stability of performance in [6] and [8] and inequality (1) or
(2) are usually used to determine whether event should be
triggered and sampled data should be transmitted or not.
Once the triggering condition deviated from the threshold,
event was executed and the updated signal would be
transmitted

to

the

control

plant

through

network

The right side of inequality (1) is a constant that has no

communication. As figure 1 shows without the sensor in

relationship with the controlled plant, we can substitute

the red dotted line, through which data is sampled

controlled plant for the constant as inequality (2) shows.

periodically. But it is waste of resource to investigate the

Ilx(t) - x(t)1 1

t
b x( )

ll

11

event generator state when the system does't deviate from

(2)

the threshold actually.

When the event generator is investigated as a discrete

manner, we have triggering condition

Periodic event-triggered control (PETC) scheme is

proposed by [29] to solve this problem, where sensors take

(3)
and

sample of the plant state at a constant rate and transfer

sampled information to event generator which determines
whether the event should be triggered. The signal would

(4)
Where

be transmitted to controlled plant only if the triggering

condition is violated from the threshold. Inequality (3) or
(4) are usually used as the triggering condition in discrete
event-triggered control schemes.
C.

tk denotes the last event time, and tk+! denotes next event

time. Inequality (3) and (4) are more reasonable through

the usage of parameters

(5,

<I>

and state-sampled-error

Time-delay And Data Dropouts

All the methods proposed above are available under the

assumption that there are not time-delay and data dropouts.
But in the real networked control systems, these research
results are impractical on account of the existence of

time-delay and packet dropout, which will lead to unstable

method is developed to remit traffic congestion problem in

performance during to the fact that the updated signal and

[24] through adaptive differential modulation.

data packet can't be transferred to system plant in time.

Tn the practical control systems, a networked control

Thus, more control schemes are proposed afterwards

system is usually consisted of several multiple control

based on previous studies taking into account transmission

loops which contain plants, sensors and actuators,

delay and packet dropout, for example, in [26].

respectively. It is intuitively called distributed networked

studied

control systems (DNCSs). Centralized event-triggered

communication delay and packet dropout separately while

control is impractical for large scale networked control

Tn

earlier

works,

some

researchers

some others considered the two issues together. Based on

systems.

PETC scheme, Ref. [3] proposed a new algorithm to solve

scheme where a subsystem is able to determine event

time-delay and data-packet loss problems that develop a

instants using its own locally sampled data in [ 13]. One

fundamental

distributed

event-triggering

new event interval model by using virtual interval

can refer to more works about this direction such as [4].

sampling technique that the ZOH interval is divided into

Each agent determines its own event according to its own

state and its neighboring

several subsets according to sampling period.

agents'

information

that

connected with it. All these works are encountered a

If II
'en or

node

If there is no packet loss

- - - - - 11(ExaIlJP' (= 4f

11

- - - -,J

common difficult problem that the interaction between

III

agents is limited. Event-based model predictive control is

proposed to solve this problem successively in [25].

Conlroller node i
ZOH ubSel'!lr

! 1
1"1------

. -

_ _ _,
,
,

'111 + Tt,
Figure 2,

112
-- -

I
?I

n'l
---

O H old!liJc,".!
_

{l,

-----

I.

IV. SELF-TRIGGERED CONTROL IN NcSs

-""9

Self-triggered control model was firstly coined by [11]

III t

rto..

in the context of real-time systems for linear system.

Aperiodic sampling control scheme in the networked

subsets of ZOH holding interval

Contrasting with the algorithm proposed in [8] which

determined triggering condition and state-feedback gain in
two steps, the new algorithm was developed to design both
of them in one step for convenience while maintained

control system is proposed by [ 12] based on theory in the

Ref. [11].
A,

Comparing With Event-triggered Control

As an alternative to event-triggered control, self

performance of closed-loop system. It shows that we can

triggered control has some considerable advantages in

determine

system

contrast with the former. It is not necessary to monitor the

performance we want to obtain. This method is more

triggering condition continuously so that this triggering

flexible. A similar control method designing triggering

mechanism can provide additional resource reduction for

condition and output feedback controller together was

the sensors and also less complexity in the physical

developed in [28], where a delay system model that took

implementation in [19]. Moreover, it provides a more

controller

gain

according

to

account into time delays and data packet dropouts together

flexible way to determine trigger instant which possibly

was firstly proposed for the purpose of system analysis

leads to no executions if the system is stable at its

and control design. Ref. [ 16] proposed a new algorithm

equilibrium point. Moreover, it needs no more specific

using the definite difference approximation for the delay

extra hardware to complete unremittingly supervision of

term to estimate the maximum allowable delay in a NCS.

triggering condition in contrast with event-triggered

The control input generator and event generator are

control. The attractive advantages of self-triggered control

designed by a same model in Ref. [2]. Thus the control

lead to a prevalent trend to investigate self-triggered

input generator states would be updated according to states

control

of event generator when time-delay and data dropout

corroborates the strong robustness of self-triggered control

happened. This method is easy to understand and apply for

with m ! * Ui71 ffl ${

us in physical design. Otherwise, traffic reduction is a

mechanism.

The

previous

work

[22]

stability to transmission

delay in networked control system in the usage of system

permanent topic for us to consider, all the former works

simulation. An implementation of self-triggered controller

have been trying to improve this property of a NCS.

in networked control systems is described to certificate

Recently, event-triggered adaptive differential modulation

that self-triggered control scheme can really be used for

reducing bandwidth occupancy while maintain stable

triggering schemes property, achievable performance

performance in [ 13] through an experimental case.

under global and local scheduling decisions et al.. One can

B. New Control Schemes Based On Self-triggered

Control

refer to [10] and Ref. [7] gives a specific introduction to

There exist several common points when we make an

analysis

of

stability

and

functions

as

control and event-triggered control regardless of specific

control schemes. Time-delay model is established in [34]
and an optimizing controller is designed to complete the
implementation. But this triggering condition is designed
for some special systems. Based on the former works on
event-triggered control, self-triggered model predictive
control with delay compensation is proposed in [20] by the
usage of two kinds of control inputs, namely the standard
control input and the delay compensation input which can
be obtained by solving the optimal control problem. A
special self-triggered control scheme is developed in [2 1]
for two classes of nonlinear system in networked control
system, namely, polynomial systems and state-dependent
homogeneous systems. The trigg- ering condition that
depends on the current measurement of states, the desired
performance and the dynamics of the system is simpler
than that are proposed in previous works. This triggering
condition has broad usage and can easily be applied to
similar

systems.

basic

introduction

to

self-triggered control in distributed networked control

systems is made in [23] and one can refer to it for detail
knowledge.

C.

In network communication, a new data packet packet

(DPP) containing all physically distributed sensors and

actuators' data packets is used to generate a new signal
through

network.

The

so-called

DPP

transmission problem has attracted certain attention so far,

which generally implies the collocation of all sensors and
actuators perfectly. Nevertheless, such an assumption does
not hold in many cases. It is essential to determine a
scheduling protocol obeyed by the central coordinator to
select the suitable data transmission node whenever a
predefined triggering rule is satisfied. Thus it is important
to make an analysis of scheduling protocol for with
different triggering schemes in networked control systems.
In

general,

V.

CONCLUSION

This paper mainly makes an overview of three different

triggering control methods from the points of triggering
schemes,

occupancy

of

system

bandwidth

and

performance stability and robustness et al. for NCSs.

Many works have been done so far, and the triggering
control

methods

are

considerable

mature.

While

time-triggered control is regarded as a basic knowledge

and essential component in modern NCSs, most are eager
to investigate event-triggered control on account of its
good properties and broad usage. Self-triggered control
has better control properties theoretically, but in fact it is
not easy to monitor each agent and keep the consensus of
them. This kind of control needs large amount of signal
communication among distributed agents.
Though many controllers developed in previous works
can be implemented in a relatively stable way, most of the
schemes are realized under some certain conservative
assumptions such as maximum allowable packet dropout
bound condition and without packet disorders. We can
also make extension researches in the following two
aspects:
(1) Most stability analysis algorithms are proposed as a
sufficient condition for the controller or triggering

Scheduling Protocols

transmitting

scheduling scheme for event-triggered control.

network

communication load reduction between self-triggered

other

Specific analysis is made through comparing different

there are several scheduling

protocols

including TDMA (time division multiple access), FDMA

(frequency division multiple access), and CSMA (carrier
sense multiple access) to multiplex the data streams in [ 10].

condition, even some of which are strongly conservative

that can be only applied to one fixed models or systems.
These triggering schemes are only limited to theoretical
analysis that has no broad applications. What we can do in
the future is trying to release the essential conditions such
as tolerating longer transmission delay time or larger
packet dropout amount and find some more available
algorithms or control models.
(2) We can seek for other new control methods that can
be combined with triggering control. Recently some
researchers begin to applying fuzzy logic control scheme
to NCSs. This is a relatively new method that is immature
for networked control systems. It is easier for us to find
some new methods in the light of fuzzy logic control
consequently.
VI. ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This work is supported by the National Natural Science

Foundation of China (6 1273026) and the Fundamental

Research Funds for the Central Universities.

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