Symbolic models of networked control systems: A feedback refinement relation approach

Networked control systems (NCS) have attracted many researchers' attention in the past few years due to their flexibility and wide range of industrial applications. In this work, we address the controller synthesis problem for NCS with sophisticated closed-loop objectives, e.g. temporal logic requirements. Specifically, we consider controller synthesis schemes based on symbolic models, also known as finite abstractions. We present a methodology to construct symbolic models for NCS using a recently introduced notion of feedback refinement relations. The symbolic models for the NCS, which incorporate several network non-idealities, can be directly obtained from the symbolic model of the plant. The constructed symbolic models can be then leveraged to algorithmically synthesize controllers while enforcing complex specifications, e.g. those given by linear temporal logic (LTL) formulae. We illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed results by constructing symbolic models of several NCS using that of the plants within them.