Distributed Continuous-Time Control via System Level Synthesis

TL;DR

This paper extends system level synthesis to continuous-time systems for designing distributed controllers that achieve near-optimal performance with local disturbance rejection.

Contribution

It introduces a two-step design procedure using SLS in continuous-time, enabling distributed control with local communication and disturbance rejection.

Findings

Distributed controllers achieve performance comparable to centralized ones.

The approach is verified on a 9-node grid simulation.

Controllers effectively reject local disturbances.

Abstract

This paper designs H2 and H-infinity distributed controllers with local communication and local disturbance rejection. We propose a two-step procedure: first, select closed-loop poles; then, optimize over parameterized controllers. We build on the system level synthesis (SLS) parameterization -- primarily used in the discrete-time setting -- and extend it to the general continuous-time setting. We verify our approach in simulation on a 9-node grid governed by linearized swing equations, where our distributed controllers achieve performance comparable to that of optimal centralized controllers while facilitating local disturbance rejection.