System-Level Performance and Communication Tradeoff in Networked Control with Predictions

TL;DR

This paper introduces PredSLS, a novel framework for distributed control that integrates disturbance predictions and communication constraints to optimize performance and communication trade-offs in networked systems.

Contribution

PredSLS jointly designs controllers with communication constraints and disturbance predictions, outperforming traditional methods by enabling scalable, parallelizable synthesis and explicit trade-off analysis.

Findings

PredSLS outperforms existing approaches with post hoc communication truncation.

The framework provides a regret bound depending on prediction error and communication range.

Identifies an optimal local communication size balancing control performance and communication cost.

Abstract

Distributed control of large-scale systems is challenging due to the need for scalable and localized communication and computation. In this work, we introduce a Predictive System-Level Synthesis PredSLS framework that designs controllers by jointly integrating communication constraints and local disturbance predictions into an affine feedback structure. Rather than focusing on the worst-case uncertainty, PredSLS leverages both current state feedback and future system disturbance predictions to achieve distributed control of networked systems. In particular, PredSLS enables a unified system synthesis of the optimal $\kappa$-localized controller, therefore outperforms approaches with post hoc communication truncation, as was commonly seen in the literature. The PredSLS framework can be naturally decomposed into spatial and temporal components for efficient and parallelizable computation across the network, yielding a regret upper bound that explicitly depends on the prediction error and communication range. Our regret analysis not only reveals a non-monotonic trade-off between control performance and communication range when prediction errors are present, but also guides the identification of an optimal size for local communication neighborhoods, thereby enabling the co-design of controller and its underlying communication topology.