Experimental evaluation of two complementary decentralized event-based control methods

Abstract : Event-based control aims at the reduction of the feedback communication effort among the sensors, controllers and actuators in control loops. The feedback communication is invoked by some well-defined triggering condition. This paper presents a new method for the decentralized event-based control of physically interconnected systems and shows its experimental evaluation. The novel method is based on two complementary approaches, called the global and the local approach, which jointly ensure the ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system. The global approach steers the state of each subsystem into a target region, whereas the local approach makes the state remain in this set in spite of exogenous disturbances and the effect of the interconnections to other subsystems. This event-based control method is applied to a continuous flow process to show its practical implementation and to evaluate the analytical results on the basis of experiments.