Intelligent temporal control

Intelligent control systems usually consist of a number of concurrent processes competing for available resources. They have processes ranging from high-level reasoning processes to low-level control processes that directly control the hardware. In these systems CPU times can be regarded as another cost and an effort has to be sought to reduce this computation cost at system design time without sacrificing the system performance. However, traditional control systems have been designed to exercise control at regularly spaced time instants. When a discrete version of the system dynamics is used, a constant sampling interval is assumed and a new control value is calculated and exercised at each time instant. We propose a new control scheme, temporal control, in which we not only calculate the control value but also decide the time instants when the new values are to be used. Taking a discrete, linear, time-invariant system, and a cost function which reflects a cost for computation of the control values, as an example, we show the feasibility of using this scheme.