We consider the design of optimal controllers for a networked system (or a spatio-temporal system), where the dynamics of each subsystem may affect those of other subsystems with some propagation delays, and the controllers may communicate with each other with some transmission delays. We show that if a simple condition holds, then the optimal control problem may be recast as a convex optimisation problem. This is shown to unify and broadly generalise the class of such systems amenable to convex synthesis. When we consider the special case of spatially invariant systems, this again broadly generalises the known class of tractable problems.

We consider a control system in which sensor data is transmitted from the plant to a receiver over a communication channel, and the receiver uses the data to estimate the state of the plant. Using a feedback policy to choose when to transmit data, the goal is to schedule transmissions to balance a trade-off between communication rate and estimation error. Computing an optimal policy for this problem is generally computationally intensive. Here we provide a simple algorithm for computing a suboptimal policy for scheduling state transmissions which incurs a cost within a factor of six of the optimal achievable cost.

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