The objective of the NEC project is to establish an enduring lab at KTH on networked embedded control systems. The long-lasting goal of the lab is to become the focal point at KTH and in Sweden for research and training on networked control, and as such collaborating with the leading academic and industrial research groups in Europe and world-wide.
Research on networked embedded control systems have major strategic relevance for the Swedish industry and society, since these systems form a key growth area in information and communication technologies with a broad range of applications that will affect the citizen in all aspects of their lives. Existing and emerging areas include automotive industry, energy management, environmental monitoring, factory automation, personal communication, process industry and transportation.
Networked systems of embedded computers change radically the way we interact with our environment by linking together sensors and actuators that allow information to be collected, shared and processed in unprecedented ways. As a constantly growing number of physical and computer systems is being networked, the complexity becomes hard to handle and the dynamic behaviour difficult to predict and control. Today there is a serious lack of rigorous tools for analyzing and synthesizing networked embedded systems. The technical contribution of this project is methodologies to enable the systematic design of large-scale and heterogeneous networked embedded systems that interoperate and adapt to their environments. We will develop network-aware control algorithms, which will make the overall system robust to dynamic variations in the communication and computing infrastructure but also flexible to unreliable sensors and actuators.
NEC is supported through an Individual Grant for the Advancement of Research Leaders by Swedish Foundation for Strategic Research.