Realization theory for poset-causal systems: controllability, observability and duality

Poset-causal systems form a class of decentralized systems introduced by Shah and Parrilo (47th IEEE conference on decision and control, IEEE, 2008) and studied mainly in the context of optimal decentralized control. In this paper, we develop part of the realization theory for poset-causal systems. More specifically, we investigate several notions of controllability and observability, and their relation under duality. These new notions extend concepts of controllability and observability in the context of coordinated linear systems (Kempker et al. in Linear Algebra Appl 437:121–167, 2012). While for coordinated linear systems there is a clear hierarchical structure with a single (main) coordinator, for poset-causal systems there need not be a single coordinator, and the communication structure between the decentralized systems allows for more intricate structures, governed by partial orders. On the other hand, we show that the class of poset-causal systems is closed under duality, which is not the case for coordinated linear systems, and that duality relations between the various notions of observability and controllability exist.