Paper #4
Control Reconfiguration of Cyber-physical Systems for Improved Performance via Reverse-engineering and Accelerated First-order Algorithms
Abstract – This paper presents a control redesign approach to improve the performance of a certain class of dynamical systems. Motivated by recent research on re-engineering cyber-physical systems, we propose a three-step control retrofit procedure. Firstly, we reverse-engineer a dynamical system as a gradient descent algorithm to solve an unconstrained convex optimization problem. Secondly, we apply a heavy ball method or an accelerated gradient descent algorithm with constant coefficients to solve this optimization problem. Finally, by comparing the original and accelerated dynamics, we obtain the implementation of the redesigned part (i.e., the extra dynamics). As a result, the convergence rate/speed of the given system can be improved, while the system structure remains. Three practical applications, including consensus in multi-agent systems, Internet congestion control and temperature control in buildings, show the effectiveness of the proposed redesign approach.
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