A Partial order approach to decentralized control

In this paper we employ the theory of partially ordered sets to model and analyze a class of decentralized control problems. We show that posets provide a natural way of modeling problems where communication constraints between subsystems have a hierarchical structure. We show that such problems have appealing algebraic properties that can be exploited to parameterize the set of stabilizing controllers. While much of the paper is devoted to problems where the plant and controller have identical communication constraints, we also generalize our theory to case where they may have different communication constraints.