NCSbench Demo: Reproducible Benchmarking Platform for Networked Control Systems The evolution of the Internet of Things accelerated the development of CyberPhysical Systems. Among them, Networked Control Systems (NCS) gained notable attention thanks to their application to industrial operations. Experimental NCS require expertise from control, computation, and communication disciplines. This requirement, together with the fragmentation of implementation platforms and experimental investigations, represents a challenge for the reproducibility and comparison of research results. In this paper, we tackle this problem by proposing a novel NCS benchmarking methodology that aids the reproducibility of NCS experiments. Relying on a novel approach to model the architectural elements and the delays of NCS, the methodology defines the experiment parameters and the relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that need to be observed during its execution. Furthermore, we detail the implementation of the first reproducible benchmarking platform for NCS. The proposed platform is opensource and designed to be easily reproducible and extensible by anyone. Finally, we replicate and evaluate the platform following the proposed NCS benchmarking methodology. The experimental results evaluate and compare the KPIs during the execution of the platform in different benchmarking scenarios, proving the validity of the proposed benchmarking methodology.

Packet priority assignment for wireless control systems of multiple physical systems Abstract   Wireless control systems (WCSs) have gained much attention lately, due to their easy deployment and flexibility compared to wired control systems. However, this comes at the cost of possibly increased network delay and packet losses, that can significantly impact the control system performance, and possibly its stability. Such problems become even more relevant if the network is shared among different control systems, and thus becomes a scarce resource, like in Industrial Internet of Things applications.  In this paper, we aim at minimizing the performance degradation of the WCS with multiple physical systems sharing a network. We propose a dynamic packet scheduling solution to minimize the performance error of WCS, by dynamically determining the packet priorities of different control systems and characteristic of network paths. We consider two cases for network path selection: (1) network delay only by developing a worstcase endtoend delay analysis; (2) network delay  reliability by proposing a new network quality model including both delay and packet losses, both of which are very important for the quality of output of the WCSs. Our solution is evaluated over two different use cases to show the generality of the approach: the WCS for a set of inverted pendula, and the WCS for small modular reactors in a nuclear power plant. The results show that the proposed approach allows for a more stable performance even in presence of highly nonlinear systems, sensitive to timevarying delays, as well as in presence of high network interference.