On the Minimum Attention and the Anytime Attention Control Problems for Linear Systems: A Linear Programming Approach

Abstract: In this paper, we present two control laws that are tailored for control applications in which computational and/or communication resources are scarce. Namely, we consider minimum attention control, where the attention' that a control task requires is minimised given certain performance requirements, and anytime attention control, where the performance under theattention' given by a scheduler is maximised. Here, we interpret `attention' as the inverse of the time elapsed between two consecutive executions of a control task. By focussing on linear plants, by allowing for only a finite number of possible intervals between two subsequent executions of the control task, by making a novel extension to the notion of control Lyapunov functions and taking these novel extended control Lyapunov function to be infinity-norm-based, we can formulate the aforementioned control problems as online linear programs, which can be solved efficiently. Furthermore, we provide techniques to construct suitable infinity-norm-based extended control Lyapunov functions for our purposes. Finally, we illustrate the resulting control laws using numerical examples. In particular, we show that minimum attention control outperforms an alternative implementation-aware control law available in the literature.