Communication and Control Co-Design for Heterogeneous Industrial IoT: A Logic-Based Stochastic Switched System Approach

With the development of Industry 4.0, mobile agents are deployed to coordinate with multi-loop control systems to perform manufacturing tasks, leading to heterogeneous Internet of Things (IoT). Due to shadow fading induced by the movement of mobile agents, the wireless channel closing the control loops is inherently unreliable, which can compromise the control system performance. This paper addresses the co-design problem of transmission scheduling and agents’ movement to ensure both control performance and energy efficiency. A generalized cyber-physical-agent framework is proposed to capture the coupling between IoT systems and a mobile agent through a state-dependent fading channel. Moreover, the movement of the mobile agent among areas exhibiting different levels of shadow effects is modeled by Markov decision process. To address such heterogeneous dynamics, the co-design problem is formulated into the optimization of a logic-based stochastic switched system by utilizing the semi-tensor product technique. Based on state mergence and H-representation methods, a tractable and effective algorithm is then proposed to design co-design policies, minimizing the average joint cost of communication and control. A parallel scheme is further developed to alleviate the computation burden of the algorithm. Theoretical guarantees are provided to ensure control system performance. Finally, simulation results are given to demonstrate effectiveness of the proposed method.