A scalable method for continuous-time distributed control synthesis

In this paper a synthesis method for distributed controllers for continuous time distributed systems, is discussed. The systems considered consists of subsystems interconnected in a graph structure. This graph represents a communication structure of the system and hence governs the structure of the admissible controller, meaning that distributed controllers are considered. The objective of the synthesis is to obtain such admissible controllers that optimize a given performance. The method is scalable with respect to the size of the system and is therefore suitable for large-scale systems. Distributed controllers are suboptimal with respect to centralized ones and it is desirable to measure the amount of performance degradation. Using the variables of the synthesis scheme, it is shown how to determine such a measure of suboptimality.