Congestion control in compartmental network systems

In many practical applications of control engineering, the dynamical system under consideration is described by a compartmental network system. This means that the system is governed by a law of mass conservation and that the state variables are constrained to remain non-negative along the system trajectories. In such systems, network congestion arises when the inflow demand exceeds the throughput capacity of the network. When congestion occurs, some links of the network are saturated with the undesirable consequence that there is an overflow of some compartments. Our contribution in this paper is to show that congestion can be automatically prevented by using a nonlinear output feedback controller having an appropriate compartmental structure. (c) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.