Communication-Aware Dissipative Output Feedback Control
This work addresses communication reduction for large-scale networks, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing dissipativity and control methods.
The paper tackles the problem of reducing communication costs in large-scale network control by proposing a dissipativity-augmented output feedback controller design method, which results in a sparsely interconnected controller that is robust and applicable to heterogeneous nonlinear networks, with efficiency demonstrated through comparisons to standard H-infinity control.
Communication-aware control is essential to reduce costs and complexity in large-scale networks. This work proposes a method to design dissipativity-augmented output feedback controllers with reduced online communication. The contributions of this work are three fold: a generalized well-posedness condition for the controller network, a convex relaxation for the constraints that infer stability of a network from dissapativity of its agents, and a synthesis algorithm integrating the Network Dissipativity Theorm, alternating direction method of multipliers, and iterative convex overbounding. The proposed approach yields a sparsely interconnected controller that is both robust and applicable to networks with heterogeneous nonlinear agents. The efficiency of these methods is demonstrated on heterogeneous networks with uncertain and unstable agents, and is compared to standard $\cH_\infty$ control.