Suboptimal control of linear time-invariant systems subject to control structure constraints

A method is presented for designing controllers for linear time-invariant systems whose states are not all available or accessible for measurement and where the structure of the controller is constrained to be a linear time-invariant combination of the measurable states of the system. Two types of structure constraints are considered: 1) each control channel is constrained to be a linear, time-invariant combination of one set of measurable states; 2) each control channel is constrained to he a linear, time-invariant combination of different sets of measurable states. The control system, subject to these constraints is selected such that the resulting closed-loop system performs as "near" to some known optimal system as is possible, i.e., suboptimal. The nearness of the optimal system to the suboptimal system is defined in two ways and thus, two types of suboptimal controllers are found.