Self-triggered controllers, resource sharing, and hard guarantees

Abstract

Today, many control applications in embedded and cyber-physical systems are implemented on shared platforms, alongside other hard real-time or safety-critical applications. Having the resource shared among several applications, to provide hard guarantees, it is required to identify the amount of resource needed for each application. This is rather straightforward when the platform is shared among periodic control and periodic real-time applications. In the case of event-triggered and self-triggered controllers, however, the execution patterns and, in turn, the resource usage are not clear. Therefore, a major implementation challenge, when the platform is shared with self-triggered controllers, is to provide hard and efficient stability and schedulability guarantees for other applications. In this paper, we identify certain execution patterns for self-triggered controllers, using which we are able to provide hard and efficient stability guarantees for periodic control applications.