ABSTRACT
This chapter defines a cost function for finding sequences that are optimal under a quadratic cost. Optimal control design is an old and well established discipline. The chapter discusses the formulation of the problem of plants connected to a controller via a limited communication network with time-triggered communication. If the bandwidth constraints of the communication medium are considered at the controller design stage, the performance of the controller significantly increases. The main problem to be solved is the following: given a continuous-time infinite horizon Linear Quadratic Regulator (LQR) problem for a distributed system, find a scheduler with a fixed periodic communication sequence and the corresponding sampled-data controller based on the continuous-time LQR cost that takes into account the limited communication medium and inter-sampling behavior. The optimal solution approach is to start from a standard continuous-time LQR problem and obtain the equivalent sampled-data representation. The chapter considers the joint controller and communication scheduling optimization problem.
