Software and Platform Issues in Feedback Control Systems

Control theory is one of the key intellectual underpinnings that allows us to analyze the interaction of software with the physical world. However, control theory abstracts software actions as actions that take no time to execute. In reality, software execution takes time – and this execution time can be affected by a number of platform issues, including the speed of the processor, the scheduler used to share the processor between multiple tasks, and network delays that occur when computations go across networks, among others. In this chapter we discuss such software and platform effects, as well as techniques used to design control systems that take these effects into account