Optimal Scheduling of Downlink Communication for a Multi-Agent System with a Central Observation Post

Journal article, 2018

In this paper, we consider a set of agents, which may receive an observation of their state by a central observa- tion post via a shared wireless network. The aim of this work is to design a scheduling mechanism for the central observation post to decide how to allocate the available communication resources. The problem is tackled in two phases: (i) first, the local controllers are designed so as to stabilise the subsystems for the case of perfect communication; (ii) second, the com- munication schedule is decided with the aim of maximising the stability of the subsystems. To this end, we formulate an optimisation problem which explicitly minimises the Lyapunov function increase due to communication limitations. We show how the proposed optimisation can be expressed in terms of Value of Information (VoI), we prove Lyapunov stability in probability and we test our approach in simulations.