Decentralized Control of a Class of Large-Scale Systems by Uncertainty Estimator

A new decentralized controller is proposed for a group of subsystems subject to unknown interconnections and external disturbances. Under the assumption that the interconnections and disturbances satisfy a structural condition, the new controller completely suppresses the effects of disturbances, and makes the overall system behave as an "uncoupled" system. In our control design, each local controller uses the uncertainty estimator proposed in [6] to obtain an estimate of the interconnections and disturbances, and then cancels these undesirable inputs directly. The major advantages of the proposed controller are that the interconnections need not satisfy the conical condition, and the strengths of interconnections and disturbances can be of any unknown size. The proposed decentralized controller is verified by a computer simulation study.