Stabilization of cyber-physical systems: a foundational theory of computer-mediated control systems

Abstract: This paper presents the cyber-physcial model of a computer-mediated control system that is a seamless, fully synergistic integration of the physical system and the cyber system, which provides a systematic framework for synthesis of cyber-physical systems (CPSs). In our proposed framework, we establish a Lyapunov stabilty theory for synthesis of CPSs and apply it to sampled-data control systems, which are typically synonymous with computer-mediated control systems. By our CPS approach, we not only develop stability criteria for sampled-data control systems but also reveal the equivalence and inherent relationship between the two main design methods (viz. controller emulation and discrete-time approximation) in the literature. As application of our established theory, we study feedback stabilization of linear sampled-data stochastic systems and propose a control design method. Illustrative examples show that our proposed method has improved the existing results. Our established theory of synthetic CPSs lays a theoretic foundation for computer-mediated control systems and provokes many open and interesting problems for future work.