Stability analysis of spatially invariant systems with event-triggered communication

In this paper we analyze spatially invariant inter-connections consisting of a (finite) number of subsystems that use packet-based communication networks for the exchange of information. An example of such an interconnected system is the platoon of vehicles that uses cooperative control to drive autonomously. By building upon a recently developed hybrid systems framework for the considered spatially invariant inter-connections, we investigate the design of event-based triggering mechanisms that aim to reduce the amount of transmission times while still guaranteeing behavior in terms of uniform global asymptotic stability (UGAS) for the overall interconnected system. To obtain tractable design conditions, we exploit the spatially invariant property. As a result, we obtain conditions based on only the local information of one of the subsystems in the interconnection and the interconnection structure itself. A nonlinear example is used to illustrate the applications and benefits of the obtained modeling approach.