This paper is concerned with the control of systems composed of multiple coupled subsystems. In such architectures, communication between different local controllers is desired in order to achieve a better overall control performance. Any resultant improvement in control performance needs, however, to be significant enough to warrant the additional design complexity and higher energy consumption and costs associated with introducing communication channels between controllers. A practical distributed control design aims, therefore, to achieve an acceptable balance between minimizing the use of communication between controllers and maximizing the system-wide performance. In this article, a new approach to the problem of synthesizing stabilizing distributed control laws for discrete-time linear systems that balances performance and communication is presented. The approach employs a supervisory agent that, periodically albeit not necessarily at every sampling instant, solves an optimization problem in order to synthesize a stabilizing state feedback control law for the system. The online optimization problem, which maximizes sparsity of the control law while minimizing an infinite-horizon performance cost, is formulated as a bilinear matrix inequality (BMI) problem; subsequently, it is then relaxed to a linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem, and (i) convergence to a solution as well as (ii) that early termination guarantees a feasible (but suboptimal) control law are proved. Stability of the closed-loop system under what is a switched control law is guaranteed by the inclusion of dwell-time constraints in the LMI problem. Finally, the efficacy of the approach is demonstrated through numerical simulation examples.

This is a repository copy of Simultaneous and sequential control design for discrete-time switched linear systems using semi-definite programming.

The partitioning of a system model will condition the structure of the controller as well as its design. In order to partition a system model, one has to know what states and inputs to group together to define subsystem models. For a given partitioning, the total magnitude of the interactions between subsystem models is evaluated. Therefore, the partitioning problem seeking for weak interactions can be posed as a minimization problem. Initially, the problem is formulated as a non-linear integer minimization that is then relaxed into a linear integer programming problem. It is shown within this paper that cuts can be applied to the initial search space in order to find the least interacting partitioning; only composed of controllable subsystems. Two examples are given to demonstrate the methodology.