Fault tolerant decentralized H∞ control for symmetric composite systems

This note discusses a class of large-scale systems composed of symmetrically interconnected identical subsystems. We consider the decentralized H∞ control design problem and study the fault tolerance of the resulting system. By exploiting the special structure of the systems, a sufficient condition for the existence of a decentralized H∞ controller is derived. Moreover, for the nominal case as well as for contingent situations characterized by control channel failures, the poles and the H∞-norm of the closed-loop system can be calculated easily based on certain systems of reduced dimensions. Consequently, the tolerance to actuator failure can be easily tested.published_or_final_versio

Sequential Synthesis of Distributed Controllers for Cascade Interconnected Systems

We consider the problem of designing distributed controllers to ensure passivity of a large-scale interconnection of linear subsystems connected in a cascade topology. The control design process needs to be carried out at the subsystem-level with no direct knowledge of the dynamics of other subsystems in the interconnection. We present a distributed approach to solve this problem, where subsystem-level controllers are locally designed in a sequence starting at one end of the cascade using only the dynamics of the particular subsystem, coupling with the immediately preceding subsystem and limited information from the preceding subsystem in the cascade to ensure passivity of the interconnected system up to that point. We demonstrate that this design framework also allows for new subsystems to be compositionally added to the interconnection without requiring redesign of the pre-existing controllers.Comment: Accepted to appear in the proceedings of the American Control Conference (ACC) 201

H2 Optimal Coordination of Homogeneous Agents Subject to Limited Information Exchange

Controllers with a diagonal-plus-low-rank structure constitute a scalable class of controllers for multi-agent systems. Previous research has shown that diagonal-plus-low-rank control laws appear as the optimal solution to a class of multi-agent H2 coordination problems, which arise in the control of wind farms. In this paper we show that this result extends to the case where the information exchange between agents is subject to limitations. We also show that the computational effort required to obtain the optimal controller is independent of the number of agents and provide analytical expressions that quantify the usefulness of information exchange

Decentralised control for complex systems - An invited survey

© 2014 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. With the advancement of science and technology, practical systems are becoming more complex. Decentralised control has been recognised as a practical, feasible and powerful tool for application to large scale interconnected systems. In this paper, past and recent results relating to decentralised control of complex large scale interconnected systems are reviewed. Decentralised control based on modern control approaches such as variable structure techniques, adaptive control and backstepping approaches are discussed. It is well known that system structure can be employed to reduce conservatism in the control design and decentralised control for interconnected systems with similar and symmetric structure is explored. Decentralised control of singular large scale systems is also reviewed in this paper

Substructural controller synthesis

A decentralized design procedure which combines substructural synthesis, model reduction, decentralized controller design, subcontroller synthesis, and controller reduction is proposed for the control design of flexible structures. The structure to be controlled is decomposed into several substructures, which are modeled by component mode synthesis methods. For each substructure, a subcontroller is designed by using the linear quadratic optimal control theory. Then, a controller synthesis scheme called Substructural Controller Synthesis (SCS) is used to assemble the subcontrollers into a system controller, which is to be used to control the whole structure