A scalable controller synthesis method for the robust control of networked systems

TL;DR

This paper introduces a scalable H-infinity control synthesis method for large networked systems with delay differential equations, explicitly accounting for delays and interconnection structures to ensure robust performance.

Contribution

It proposes a novel approach that bounds the system's H-infinity norm by that of a single subsystem with uncertainty, enabling scalable controller design.

Findings

The method effectively handles large networks with delays.

It provides a systematic way to compute the robust H-infinity norm.

Controllers designed using this approach improve robustness against delays.

Abstract

This manuscript discusses a scalable controller synthesis method for networked systems with a large number of identical subsystems based on the H-infinity control framework. The dynamics of the individual subsystems are described by identical linear time-invariant delay differential equations and the effect of transport and communication delay is explicitly taken into account. The presented method is based on the result that, under a particular assumption on the graph describing the interconnections between the subsystems, the H-infinity norm of the overall system is upper bounded by the robust H-infinity norm of a single subsystem with an additional uncertainty. This work will therefore briefly discuss a recently developed method to compute this last quantity. The resulting controller is then obtained by directly minimizing this upper bound in the controller parameters.