MANAGING COORDINATED CONTROL BY MULTIPLE DECISION MODULES

• Main Authors: VETTRIVEL VISHNU, SANDOVAL MICHAEL LUIS, LAZARUS MIKE, KOHN WOLF, CROSS JONATHAN, KNOX JASON, TALBY DAVID
• Format: Patent
• Language: English
• Published: 24.12.2015
• Subjects: CALCULATING; COMPUTING; CONJOINT CONTROL OF VEHICLE SUB-UNITS OF DIFFERENT TYPE ORDIFFERENT FUNCTION; CONTROL OR REGULATING SYSTEMS IN GENERAL; CONTROL SYSTEMS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR HYBRID VEHICLES; CONTROLLING; COUNTING; DATA PROCESSING SYSTEMS OR METHODS, SPECIALLY ADAPTED FORADMINISTRATIVE, COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORYOR FORECASTING PURPOSES; ELECTRIC EQUIPMENT OR PROPULSION OF ELECTRICALLY-PROPELLEDVEHICLES; ELECTRODYNAMIC BRAKE SYSTEMS FOR VEHICLES, IN GENERAL; FUNCTIONAL ELEMENTS OF SUCH SYSTEMS; MAGNETIC SUSPENSION OR LEVITATION FOR VEHICLES; MONITORING OR TESTING ARRANGEMENTS FOR SUCH SYSTEMS ORELEMENTS; PERFORMING OPERATIONS; PHYSICS; REGULATING; ROAD VEHICLE DRIVE CONTROL SYSTEMS FOR PURPOSES NOT RELATED TOTHE CONTROL OF A PARTICULAR SUB-UNIT; SYSTEMS OR METHODS SPECIALLY ADAPTED FOR ADMINISTRATIVE,COMMERCIAL, FINANCIAL, MANAGERIAL, SUPERVISORY OR FORECASTINGPURPOSES, NOT OTHERWISE PROVIDED FOR; TRANSPORTING; VEHICLES IN GENERAL

Techniques are described for implementing automated control systems that manipulate operations of specified target systems, such as by modifying or otherwise manipulating inputs or other control elements of the target system that affect its operation (e.g., affect output of the target system). An automated control system may in some situations have a distributed architecture with multiple decision modules that each controls a portion of a target system and operate in a partially decoupled manner with respect to each other, such as by each decision module operating to synchronize its local solutions and proposed control actions with those of one or more other decision modules, in order to determine a consensus with those other decision modules. Such inter-module synchronizations may occur repeatedly to determine one or more control actions for each decision module at a particular time, as well as to be repeated over multiple times for ongoing control.