A Component-Based Approach to the Design of Networked Control Systems

Component-based techniques revolve around composable, reusable software objects that shield the application level software from the details of the hardware and low-level software implementation and vice versa. Components provide many benefits that have led to their wide adoption in software and middleware developed for embedded systems: They are well-defined entities that can be replaced without affecting the rest of the systems, they can be developed and tested separately and easily integrated later, and they are reusable. Clearly such features are important for the design of large-scale complex systems more generally, beyond software architectures. In this tutorial we propose the use of a component approach to address embedded control problems. We outline a general componentbased framework to embedded control and show how it can be instantiated in specific problems that arise in the control over/of sensor networks. Building on the middleware component framework developed under the European project RUNES, we develop a number of control-oriented components necessary for the implementation of control applications and design their integration. The present paper provides the overview of the approach, discusses a real life application where the approach has been tested and outlines a number of specific control problems that arise in this application. Companion papers provide the details of the implementation of specific components to address these control problems, as well as experimental validation results. (Less)