Resource utilization and Quality-of-Control trade-off for a composable platform

This paper deals with implementation of feedback controllers on embedded platforms and investigates the trade-off between Quality-of-Control (QoC) and resource utilization. In particular, we consider a setting where the embedded platform executes multiple applications including the control application under consideration. Such a setting is common in domains like automotive where consolidation of several applications is desirable for cost reasons. While tackling inter-application interference is a challenge, our platform offers composability using resource virtualization allowing for interference-free application development and cycle-accurate timing behavior. In this work, from the feedback control perspective, we show that platform timing behavior can be characterized by a finite, known and periodic set of sampling intervals for a given resource allocation. Utilizing the platform timing, we show that the control design problem can be transformed into a classical discrete-time Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem which can be efficiently solved to obtain optimal QoC for a given resource allocation. Our method is validated both in simulation and experiments, considering a Multiple-Input and Multiple-Output (MIMO) control application