Chaos and order in event-triggered control

Abstract: Event-triggered control (ETC) is claimed to provide enormous reductions in sampling frequency when compared to periodic sampling, but little is formally known about its generated traffic. This work shows that ETC can exhibit very complex, even chaotic traffic, especially when the triggering condition is aggressive in reducing communications. First, we characterize limit traffic patterns by observing invariant lines and planes through the origin, as well as their attractivity. Then, we present abstraction-based methods to compute limit metrics, such as limit average and limit inferior inter-sample time (IST) of periodic ETC (PETC), with considerations to the robustness of such metrics, as well as measuring the emergence of chaos. The methodology and tools allow us to find ETC examples that provably outperform periodic sampling in terms of average IST. In particular for PETC, we prove that this requires aperiodic or chaotic traffic.