An Iterative Learning Control Approach to Improving Fidelity in Internet-Distributed Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation

One of the main challenges of co-simulating hardware-in-the-loop systems in real-time over the Internet is the fidelity of the simulation. The dynamics of the Internet may significantly distort the dynamics of the network-integrated system. This paper presents the development of an iterative learning control based approach to improve fidelity of such networked system integration. Towards this end, a new metric for characterizing fidelity is proposed first, which, unlike some existing metrics, does not require knowledge about the reference dynamics (i.e., dynamics that would be observed, if the system was physically connected). Next, using this metric, the problem of improving fidelity is formulated as an iterative learning control problem. Finally, the proposed approach is illustrated on a purely simulation-based case study. The conclusion is that the proposed approach holds significant potential for achieving high fidelity levels.