Continuous mode changes in mechatronic systems

This work deals with the problem of controlling highly dynamic mechatronic systems. Such systems may work in several different operation modes, or even underlie continuous mode changes. While concepts are available that deal with discrete operation modes, the continuous case is unsolved. In This work, some ideas of how to tackle the scheduling problem with continuous mode changes are discussed. It is assumed that in mechatronic systems not all modes are realistic. A higher requirement in one system component may exclude higher requirements in other components. We expect that such dependencies are specified in the technical specification of the mechatronic system, and from them the domain of realistic modes can be derived. We discuss two optimization problems: (1) given a set of hosts, find a minimum number of allocations that feasibly cover the whole domain of realistic modes. (2) In the design phase one would like to minimize the number of processors for which such a set of allocations exists.