Analysis of event-driven controllers for linear systems

Most research in control engineering considers periodic or time-triggered control systems with equidistant sample intervals. However, practical cases abound in which it is of interest to consider event-driven control in which the sampling is event-triggered. Although there are various benefits of using event-driven control like reducing resource utilization (e.g., processor and communication load), their application in practice is hampered by the lack of a system theory for event-driven control systems. To provide a first step in developing an event-driven system theory, this paper considers an event-driven control scheme for perturbed linear systems. The event-driven control scheme triggers the control update only when the (tracking or stabilization) error is large. In this manner, the average processor and/or communication load can be reduced significantly. The analysis in this paper is aimed at the control performance in terms of practical stability (ultimate boundedness). Several examples illustrate the theory.