Survey of Techniques for Handling Timing Problems in Distributed Control

This is an overview of distributed computer control systems from the perspective of control performance and the requirements of a safety-critical application. The common timing issues, here called the timing problems, are stated from a control point of view: control period, control delay, jitter and transient error. seen as disturbances acting on the closed loop via the digital computer system, see figure 1, [TÖR95] and [SHI95]. They are partly introduced at design time. Performance and stability of the closed loop depend on control period, control delay, jitter and transient errors. The timing problems comprise all relevant issues concerning timing in a computer system, seen from a control perspective. Because of the nature of dynamic systems, a certain amount of e.g. uncompensated jitter can be tolerated.