Novel Input-output Representation of General Non-uniformly
Sampled-data Systems*
Li Xie, Huizhong Yang, Feng Ding and Hongfeng Tao
Abstract— The lifted state space model and the corresponding
lifted transfer function model have been widely adopted to de-
scribe non-uniformly sampled-data (NUSD) systems. However,
the lifted models are too complex and involve a large number
of parameters, which bring a great challenge to NUSD systems
identification and control. Motivated by this fact, we propose
a novel input-output representation of general NUSD systems
by introducing a time-varying backward shift operator. Based
on the novel model, the traditional identification methods and
control strategies of single-rate systems can be easily extended
to general NUSD systems. The advantages and effectiveness of
the novel model are well illustrated by a simulation example.
I. INTRODUCTION
Non-uniformly sampled-data (NUSD) systems with irreg-
ular sampling intervals for the inputs and/or outputs are
a class of general multirate systems [1]. Due to hard-
ware limitations, economic considerations and environmental
impacts, NUSD systems are widely existed in networked
control systems [2], [3], distributed control systems [4] and
process industries [5]. Compared with the uniform sampling,
non-uniform sampling can acquire more useful information
within a finite sampling time. It can help reduce the average
sampling frequency and improve the utilization efficiency
of the processor [6]. Therefore, non-uniform sampling have
been widely applied in radar target recognition, signal de-
tection and data communication fields. Furthermore, the
NUSD control systems can improve the properties of the
conventional single-rate control systems [7], [8]. Thus, the
manipulated variables or the controlled variables can be non-
uniformly updated or sampled in order to meet certain special
control requirements [9].
In recent years, NUSD systems have been widely dis-
cussed in the area of identification and control [10]. For
example, Ding et al. derived a hierarchical identification
algorithm for the lifted state space model, and studied the
reconstruction of the original continuous-time system [11].
Ding and Lin presented a modified subspace identification
algorithm for the lifted state space model, where the causality
constraint was tackled by decomposition of the lifted mea-
surement equation [12]. To avoid solving the causality con-
straint and reduce the computational load, a partially coupled
*This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China (No. 61403166) and the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu
Province (China, BK20140164).
The authors are with Faculty of the Control Sci-
ence and Engineering Research Center, Jiangnan Univer-
sity, Wuxi, P. R. China xieli@jiangnan.edu.cn
(L. Xie); yhz@jiangnan.edu.cn (H.Z. Yang);
fding@jiangnan.edu.cn (F. Ding);
taohongfeng@hotmail.com (H.F. Tao)
stochastic gradient algorithm [13] and an auxiliary model
based multi-innovation generalized extended stochastic gra-
dient algorithm [14] were proposed to identify the lifted
transfer function model. For more complex NUSD systems
with asynchronous input updating and output sampling, Li et
al. proposed a novel subspace approach to identify the lifted
state space model, and further investigated the problem of
fault detection and isolation [15], [16].
To the best of our knowledge, many identification and
control methods for NUSD systems are proposed based on
the lifted state space model or the lifted transfer function
model. However, these two models both have their own
limitations, i.e., the former suffers from the problem of
causality constraint, and the latter is complex and includes a
large number of parameters. To overcome the limitations of
the lifted models, this paper proposes a novel input-output
representation of general NUSD systems with asynchronous
input updating and output sampling by introducing a time-
varying backward shift operator. The major advantage of
the proposed model lies in its concise structure with fewer
parameters.
The rest of this paper is organized as follows. Sec-
tion II presents the problem formulation, followed by model
derivation in Section III. Section IV gives an identification
algorithm for the proposed novel model. Section V provides
an illustration example. Finally, conclusions are given in
Section VI.
II. PROBLEM FORMULATION
✲♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣
H
τ
✲
P
✲
S
τ +∆
♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣♣ ✲
u(kT + t
i
) u(t) y(t)
y(kT + t
i+∆
)
Fig. 1. Non-uniformly sampled-data systems
Consider a class of general NUSD systems as depicted in
Figure 1, where P is a continuous linear time-invariant (LTI)
process with input u( t) and output y(t), described by
˙
x(t) = Ax(t) + Bu(t),
y(t) = Cx(t) + Du(t).
(1)
Here, x(t) ∈ R
n
is the state vector, A, B, C are constant
matrices with appropriate dimensions, and D is a constant.
Furthermore, H
τ
and S
τ +∆
are a non-uniform zero-
order hold and a non-uniform output sampler, respectively,
which are assumed to have a periodic non-uniform updating
and sampling pattern. Over each frame period T , the non-
uniform input sequence u(kT + t
i
) is updated r times with
intervals {τ
1
, τ
2
, ··· , τ
r
}, and the sampling instants are
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