Summary
This paper considers a class of cyber‐physical networked systems, which are composed of many interacted subsystems, and are controlled in a distributed framework. The operating point of each subsystem changes with the varying of working conditions or productions, which may cause the change of the interactions among subsystems correspondingly. How to adapt to this change with good closed‐loop optimization performance and appropriate information connections is a problem. To solve this problem, the impaction of a subsystem's control action on the performance of related closed‐loop subsystems is first deduced for measuring the coupling among subsystems. Then, a distributed model predictive control (MPC) for tracking, whose subsystems online reconfigure their information structures, is proposed based on this impaction index. When the operating points changed, each local MPC calculates the impaction indices related to its structural downstream subsystems. If and only if the impaction index exceeds a defined bound, its behavior is considered by its downstream subsystem's MPC. The aim is to improve the optimization performance of entire closed‐loop systems and avoid the unnecessary information connections among local MPCs. Besides, contraction constraints are designed to guarantee that the overall system converges to the set points. The stability analysis is also provided. Simulation results show that the proposed impaction index is reasonable along with the efficiency of the proposed distributed MPC.