Reducing communication and actuation in distributed control systems

This paper addresses the problem of reducing the number of transmissions and control updates in a distributed control network of interconnected linear systems. Each node in the network decides when to transmit its state through the network and when to update the control law. Both decisions are event-driven and based on local information. It is shown that the stability of the system is preserved and the state of the system converges to a small region around the origin, whose size depends on the parameters of the transmission and control update trigger functions. A strictly positive lower bound for the inter-event times is derived. The results are illustrated through simulations showing the effectiveness of the proposed approach.