Optimal and event-based networked control of physically interconnected systems and multi-agent systems

Many interconnected systems like vehicle platoons or energy networks consist of similar or identical subsystems. The subsystem interconnections are either caused by the physical relations among the subsystems or have to be introduced by the controller to cope with cooperative control goals. This paper proposes strategies to reduce the complexity of the controller design problem (offline information reduction) and to reduce the amount of the system information, which is necessary for the implementation of the designed controller (online information reduction). It consists of two parts. The first part deals with the linear quadratic regulator (LQR) design problem for interconnected systems. A decomposition based on a state transformation is introduced, which allows to design the optimal controller for the interconnected system by considering modified subsystems separately. The proposed decomposition approach can be uniformly applied to multi-agent systems and physically interconnected systems.The second part of the paper introduces an event-based control strategy for multi-agent systems. The event-based control is a means to reduce the communication effort by invoking an information exchange among the subsystems only when the deviation between the estimated and current subsystem state exceeds an event threshold. An event-based controller is proposed, which mimics the continuous state-feedback controller with a desired precision. The relation between the event threshold and the approximation error is analysed.