Communication Infrastructure Design in Cyber Physical Systems with Applications in Smart Grids: A Hybrid System Framework

This paper provides a survey on communications in CPS and a tutorial of a unified framework, i.e., hybrid system featured by the co-existence of discrete and continuous system states, for the design of communication infrastructure in cyber physical system (CPS). First, CPS with communication infrastructure is modeled as a hybrid system, in which the discrete system state is the mode of the communication infrastructure while the continuous system state is the state of the physical dynamics. The dynamical system can be considered as being switched among multiple modes corresponding to the discrete system state. Then, the communication infrastructure design is converted to the problems of mode provisioning and scheduling. This framework is applied in the context of smart grid as a special example of CPS and is shown to achieve good performance via numerical simulations.