Networked control system co-simulation for co-design

We provide a general framework for networked control systems (NCSs) and review previous theoretical results for NCS co-design. We present experimental studies of control and feedback scheduling of NCSs, consisting of dynamic system simulations for the control agents and environment and packet-level network simulations for the communications. To this end, we have extended the ns-2 release in order to simulate the transmissions of plants and controllers that are modeled by ODEs (solved via a linked package). Our results show the overall control and network performances achieved while modeling the individual control and network components. Major co-design issues, such as scalability and network heterogeneity, are explored.