Switching Control of Linear Time-Varying Networked Control Systems with Sparse Observer-Controller Networks

TL;DR

This paper develops stability conditions and an iterative algorithm for designing sparse, distributed observer-controller networks in linear time-varying systems, ensuring stability with bounded gains.

Contribution

It introduces a novel stability framework and a low-complexity iterative method for designing sparse, distributed observer-controller networks with stability guarantees.

Findings

Stability conditions for linear time-varying networked control systems.

An iterative algorithm for sparse network design.

Distributed observers improve system stability.

Abstract

In this paper we provide a set of stability conditions for linear time-varying networked control systems with arbitrary topologies using a piecewise quadratic switching stabilization approach with multiple quadratic Lyapunov functions. We use this set of stability conditions to provide a novel iterative low-complexity algorithm that must be updated and optimized in discrete time for the design of a sparse observer-controller network, for a given plant network with an arbitrary topology. We employ distributed observers by utilizing the output of other subsystems to improve the stability of each observer. To avoid unbounded growth of controller and observer gains, we impose bounds on the norms of the gains.