A Quality of Control Architecture and Codesign Method

An architecture and a method supporting codesign of flexible computer control systems are proposed in this paper. We call this approach Quality of Control to reflect the emphasis on control performance. Key components of the architecture include negotiation to optimize overall quality, admission control, explicit specifications of control characteristics and timing constraints, and on-line estimation of the control performance as a function of the actual system timing. The purpose is to give flexibility in terms of scalability, maintainability, configurability and graceful degradation.