A component-based approach to the design of networked control systems

Component-based techniques revolve around composable,
reusable software objects that shield the application
level software from the details of the hardware and low-level
software implementation and vice versa. Components provide
many benefits that have led to their wide adoption in software
and middleware developed for embedded systems: They are
well-defined entities that can be replaced without affecting the
rest of the systems, they can be developed and tested separately
and easily integrated later, and they are reusable. Clearly such
features are important for the design of large-scale complex
systems more generally, beyond software architectures. In this
tutorial we propose the use of a component approach to address
embedded control problems. We outline a general componentbased
framework to embedded control and show how it can
be instantiated in specific problems that arise in the control
over/of sensor networks. Building on the middleware component
framework developed under the European project RUNES,
we develop a number of control-oriented components necessary
for the implementation of control applications and design their
integration. The present paper provides the overview of the
approach, discusses a real life application where the approach
has been tested and outlines a number of specific control
problems that arise in this application. Companion papers
provide the details of the implementation of specific components
to address these control problems, as well as experimental
validation results.