ControlService: a containerized solution for control-algorithm-as-a-service in cloud control systems

As an extension of networked control systems, cloud control systems (CCSs) have emerged as a new control paradigm to improve the service quality of emerging control missions, such as data-driven modeling and automated vehicles. Existing studies have used the workflow-based restructured method to optimize the computation-intensive algorithms in the CCSs. However, the challenges here are how to define and submit these algorithms’ workflows as cloud services and execute these algorithms’ workflows in a containerized manner. Based on these challenges, we propose a containerized solution for the control-algorithm-as-a-service (C3aS) in the CCSs, namely ControlService. It offers the control algorithm as a cloud workflow service and uses a customized workflow engine to realize the containerized execution. First, we employ a cloud workflow representation method to define a control algorithm into an abstract cloud workflow form. Afterward, we provide a cloud service representation of the abstract cloud workflow. Next, we design a workflow engine and submit the cloud service to this workflow engine to implement containerized execution of this cloud service in the CCSs. In the experiment, we discuss the cloud service form and containerized implementation of the subspace identification method. Experimental results show that the proposed ControlService has significant performance advantages in computational time, reduction percentage, and speedup ratio compared with the baseline method.