Distributed Linear-Quadratic Control of Serially Chained Systems: Application to a Water Delivery Canal [Applications of Control]

Networks are prevalent in many human activities such as communication, transport, energy, and water delivery and drainage. Large networks that spread over wide-space areas cross the borders of different administrative regions, or even countries, and are managed by regional decision centers that may have to comply with different legal requirements. With networking comes complexity and the need to coordinate local decisions, which is an issue for which control and optimization can provide significant contributions. The sources of complexity are many, including the heterogeneous nature of some information patterns and the need to perform control over communication networks that may fail or have varying delays. This article does not attempt to address all of these issues. Instead, the attention is concentrated on how to design distributed controllers for plants that can be modeled by the serial interconnection of subsystems.