Control of Large-Scale Cyber-Physical Systems with Agents via a Representative Model

In this paper, a controller design methodology is discussed for a large-scale cyber-physical system (CPS) with agents having various characteristics. Especially, a representative model is introduced, which helps us to design controllers. Actually, the representative model is of much lower order than the scale of the large-scale CPS, and thus designing a controller for this model is much easier. In this paper, we derive a representative model such that a controller designed for this model stabilizes the original large-scale CPS with given control performance. The derived representative model is in the form of a nominal model with the average discrepancy.

I. Introduction

Recently, there is a huge focus on cyber-physical systems (CPSs), where computing devices and physical components are integrated. Especially, control of CPSs has been vigorously investigated [1] because control technologies for CPSs are inevitable to develop sustainable social infrastructures. For example, power systems, traffic systems, robotic and sensor networks are typical applications [2]–[6]. Nowadays, the scale of CPSs is getting larger and larger due to the increase in the amount of data from the physical components. The amount of data is reaching so called big data [7] because now it becomes too large to be handled by the traditional control theory. Thus, it is urgent to develop a new technology to utilize big data for control of super large-scale CPSs.