Automatica, Vol.82, 42-48, 2017
Observer design for networked control systems with FlexRay
We design state observers for nonlinear networked control systems (NCS) implemented over FlexRay. FlexRay is a communication protocol used in the automotive industry, which has the feature to switch between two scheduling rules during its communication cycles. These switches induce technical difficulties when modeling, designing and analyzing observers for such systems compared to standard NCS. We present a solution based on the emulation approach. Given an observer in the absence of communication constraints, we implement it over the network and we provide sufficient conditions on the latter, to preserve the stability property of the observer. In particular, we provide explicit bounds on the maximal allowable transmission intervals, which adapt to the lengths of the segment associated to each scheduling rule. We assume that the plant dynamics and measurements are affected by noise and we guarantee an input-to-state stability property for the corresponding estimation error system. The overall system is modeled as a hybrid system and the analysis relies on the use of a novel hybrid Lyapunov function. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.