Predictive control, embedded cyberphysical systems and systems of systems - A perspective.

Today’s world is changing rapidly due to advancements in information technology, computation and communication. Actuation, communication, sensing, and control are becoming ubiquitous. These technological advancements have led to the widespread availability of information and the possibility to connect systems in unforeseen manner. There is a strong desire for smart(er) cities, buildings, devices, factories, health monitoring – a smarter world. However, designing such a smarter world requires addressing also many challenges resulting from the emerging complex interactions and interoperation of systems. How is it possible to handle the increasing complexity during design and maintenance of such systems? How can one guarantee safety and performance of systems operating over networks which are subject to erroneous communication, delays, and failures of sensors and actuators? Is it possible to design control systems which allow for easy reconfiguration or even self-organization, for example by letting subsystems join and leave larger systems via plug and play strategies? Can one guarantee privacy of the controlled subsystems while exchanging information, which is necessary for maintaining overall system performance? We believe that predictive control is a well suited control approach to tackle some of these challenges due to its flexibility with respect to the formulation of the problem and the possibility to directly take constraints, preview information, as well as models of different complexity of the physical world into account. In this perspective we limit our attention to three areas we believe predictive control methods can provide a basis to tackle the appearing challenges: the efficient and easy implementation of predictive control on omnipresent embedded computation hardware, the question of resource and network aware control, as well as control on the network level of systems of systems. We briefly summarize results from these fields and outline some ideas on challenges, which arise.