Control of large-scale dynamic systems by aggregation

A method is proposed to obtain a model of a dynamic system with a state vector of high dimension. The model is derived by "aggregating" the original system state vector into a lower-dimensional vector. Some properties of the aggregation method are investigated in the paper. The concept of aggregation, a generalization of that of projection, is related to that of state vector partition and is useful not only in building a model of reduced dimension, but also in unifying several topics in the control theory such as regulators with incomplete state feedback, characteristic value computations, model controls, and bounds on the solution of the matrix Riccati equations, etc. Using the quantitative definition of weak coupling proposed by Milne, a suboptimal control policy for the weakly coupled system is derived. Questions of performance degradation and of stability of such suboptimally controlled systems are also answered in the paper.