A network interface device for networked control system with time-driven mode

Network-induced imperfections such as transmission delays, time-varying sampling intervals and clock asynchronization among nodes make it complicated to analysis and design a networked control system (NCS). Further, constructing such an NCS becomes tedious and difficult when there are a number of nodes needed to be integrated together through the imperfect network. In this paper, to solve these problems, we design and develop a network interface device termed as information pipeline CAN (IPCAN) that can facilitate rapid integration of network nodes and provide well-designed transmission properties. The IPCAN adopts information pipeline technology (IPT) to construct an endpoint-based data interface, which makes nodes modular and reusable. A time-triggered information-exchange mechanism is proposed for the IPCAN to achieve fixed and predictable transmission delays and temporal-spatial consistency of received data. These properties contribute to realizing synchronous time-driven mode among nodes and simplifying the analysis of the system. In addition, several novel technical methods are proposed to implement the IPCAN with controller area network (CAN) and serial peripheral interface (SPI) as the physical connections of network and user interface, respectively. The IPCAN is applied to a distributed temperature control system and its utility and performance are well demonstrated. (C) 2018 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.