Dealing with time-delay in coordination-by-constraints methods

In this paper we present ideas on how to take care of communication time-delays in the supervision of networked control systems subject to coordination constraints to be enforced on-line. Such a coordination paradigm, referred to hereafter as coordination by constraints, is characterized by a set of spatially distributed dynamic systems, connected via communication channels, with possibly dynamical coupling among them which need to be supervised and coordinated in order to accomplish their overall objective. The significance of the method is that it is customizable to the specific QoS of the network and capable of ensuring coordination and stability. A set-point reconfiguration problem in networked multi-area power systems is presented.