Predictive control in the era of networked control and communication: A perspective

Advances in communication, information technology, and computation have led to a rapid change of today’s world. Actuation, communication, sensing, and control are becoming ubiquitous. While this offers many possibilities - Smart cities, Smart buildings, Smart devices, Smart factories, Smart health monitoring a smarter world - there are also several challenges which need to be tackled. How can one handle the increasing complexity? Can one guarantee safety and performance of such networked control systems subject to erroneous communication, delays, and failures of sensors and actuators? Is it possible to design control systems with plug and play capacity? How can one guarantee privacy of the controlled subsystems while exchanging information? Predictive control is a well suited control approach to tackle some of these challenges, since its allows to directly take constraints, preview information, as well as models of the physical world into account.We limit our attention to three areas we believe predictive control methods can have a significant impact: the efficient and easy implementation of predictive control on the omnipresent embedded computation hardware, the control under resource limitations and network effects, and the control on the network level, outlining a contract based control approach which allows a structured, yet flexible hierarchical design.We briefly review results from these fields and outline some solutions related to our work, that provide possible solutions to the considered challenges