Analogies in the controller design for multi-agent and physically interconnected systems with identical subsystems

This paper considers interconnected systems consisting of identical subsystems. The subsystem interconnections are either caused by the physical relations or have to introduced by the controllers. In both cases, decomposition methods are needed to reduce the complexity of the controller design problem. The discrete-time LQR design problem for interconnected systems is considered in this paper. A decomposition approach is introduced which can be uniformly applied to both interconnection structures. It reduces the controller design for the overall system to separate design problems for the modified subsystems, which have the order of a single isolated subsystem.