Robust decentralised control of a class of nonlinear system so as to track a given reference input signal and reject a known class of disturbance signals is proposed. The controller consists of tracking-errordriven servocompensators and local stabilisers. The servo compensators contain the modes of not only the external signals but also the internal signals. The local stabiliser must be designed to yield large damping and low overshoot. A computer-aided-design procedure is given.
IntroductionThe problem of designing a decentralised controller for a class of nonlinear systems is relevant in practice, for example in large-scale power systems [1,2]. The robust decentralised control strategy for a linear system consists of an inclusion of tracking-error-driven servocompensators followed by the stabilisation of the composite system formed from the process, with the servocompensators using only the local measurable states. The servocompensator is a linear system whose poles are the modes of the external signals, namely the reference input and the disturbance signals. In the steady state, the tracking error is zero and the servocompensator generates a signal with modes identical to that of the reference and the disturbance signals. In essence, the tracking and disturbance rejection is achieved by injecting a copy of the external signals (a copy of the signal means that they have identical modes) into the process. The stabilisation of the composite system is achieved using local dynamic compensators or state feedback controllers implemented via observers or classical compensators. A decentralised controller for the stabilisation of the composite system has received a lot of attention in the control literature [1,6,7].There are two aspects concerning the problem of decentralised controllers. One aspect concerns the existence of a decentralised controller, and once the existence is guaranteed the other aspect concerns the determination of the structure and the parameters of the controller. The existence of a decentralised controller for a linear time-inVariant system has been considered in Reference 1. Necessary and sufficient conditions are expressed in terms of decentralised fixed modes of certain matrices of the system. Further, it is shown that, if each subsystem is controllable and observable, and its transmission zeros are distinct from the external signal modes, then, for almost all interconnections, there exists a decentralised controller. A number of sufficient conditions have been proposed in the literature [6,7] for the determination of the structure and the parameters of the controller. Essentially, the algorithms involve interactive computation even for a linear time-invariant system.In this paper, an extension of the results of the linear robust servomechanism problem to a class of nonlinear systems is considered. Motivated by the simplicity of implementation of linear robust servomechanism control strategy, a similar, but a more general, linear controller structure is assumed.A class of nonlinear systems, mo...