Plug-and-Play control - Theory and implementation

Technological systems are live systems which are subject to persistent changes. For instance, instrumentations fail or are added, operation modes are changed or communication network topologies are modified. This paper presents a concept to adjust control laws and reference trajectory models to new configurations of the closed loop. The introduced Plug-and-Play Control utilises a communication network to exchange control algorithms between physically separated components. This paper elucidates the concept and describes an implementation of the algorithm exchange by remote procedure calls and model construction functions provided by MATLAB. Experiments on a fluid process illustrate the performance of Plug-and-Play Control and point out the necessary application requirements.