Using JitterTime to Analyze Transient Performance in Adaptive and Reconfigurable Control Systems

This paper presents JitterTime, a small Matlab toolbox for calculating the transient performance of a control system in non-ideal timing scenarios. Such scenarios arise in networked and embedded systems, where several applications share a set of limited and varying resources. Technically, the toolbox evaluates the time-varying state covariance of a mixed continuous/discrete linear system driven by white noise. It also integrates a quadratic cost function for the system. The passing of time and the updating of the discrete-time systems are explicitly managed by the user in a simulation run. Since the timing is completely handled by the user, any complex timing scenario can be analyzed, including adaptive scheduling and reconfiguration between different system modes. Three examples of how the toolbox can be used to evaluate the control performance of such time-varying systems are given.