Model Predictive Controllers over Differentiated Services Packet Networks

One of the main issues in assuring plant stability in networked control systems (NCS) is related to the presence of a packet-based network which may introduce communication delay and packet dropouts. We improve the standard network model by considering a more complex communication architecture where different transmission options with different reliability (i.e., packet loss probabilities or amount of delays) are available. This behavior is obtained by introducing quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees in packet-based networks through the differentiated services (DiffServ) approach according to which packets are marked and sent by using either a high- or a low-priority service class. In this work, we investigate the extension of the model predictive control (MPC) to choose both the command value and its assignment to one of the two classes according to the predicted state of the plant and the knowledge of network condition.