On synthesizing robust decentralised controllers

Many advances have been made in the area of multi-dimension, centralized control in recent years. These technical advances have led to increased application in ever widening domains of complexity and scale. Unfortunately, the control of many large scale systems still present prohibitive costs in terms of instrumenting up centralized control solutions. Decentralized control continues to be a viable alternative when face with issues of complexity, limitations on computation and restrictions on implementation. However, a methodology for the systematic synthesis of robust decentralized controllers still remains a difficulty. This paper addresses the issue of placing the decentralized control problem in a μ-framework. The difficulties in developing a robust, concurrent decentralized design methodology is detailed. An alternative sequential design approach which leads to a D-K like algorithm for the design of robust decentralized controllers is presented.