Integrated design of structural and control systems with a homotopy like iterative method

We consider an integrated design problem of structural and control systems. It is well known that even the simplest formulation of this problem results in a kind of a BMI problem. In this paper, a homotopy-like iterative design method based on LMIs is proposed to obtain an optimal plant and a controller simultaneously for a full-order output feedback problem. We can deal with a multiobjective problem, e.g., H₂/H_∞ control problem etc. in the proposed design method. We can also optimize structural design parameters appearing nonlinearly in the coefficient matrices of the plant state-space form using the first order approximation of the nonlinear dependence in the proposed algorithm. Several design examples show that the proposed algorithm works quite effectively for various integrated design problems.