A Communication Synthesis Infrastructure for Heterogeneous Networked Control Systems and Its Application to Building Automation and Control

In networked control systems the controller of a physically distributed plant is implemented as a collection of tightly-interacting, concurrent processes running on a distributed execution platform. The execution platform consists of a set of heterogeneous components (sensors, actuators, and controllers) that interact through a hierarchical communication network. The authors propose a methodology and a framework for design exploration and automatic synthesis of the communication network. They present how their approach can be applied to the design of control systems for intelligent buildings.