Performance-oriented communication topology design for distributed control of interconnected systems

Communication networks provide a larger flexibility for the control design of interconnected systems by allowing the information exchange between the local controllers of the subsystems which can be used to improve the overall system performance. However, the interconnected systems may become unstable due to permanent communication link failures. This article presents a novel two-layer control architecture that allows to jointly improve the system performance which is the decay rate and guarantee the stability of the interconnected system under permanent communication link failures. As a novelty, the design of communication topology between the local controllers is also taken into account. On the other hand, it is still not well understood how significant the role of each possible communication link is in improving the system performance. Another novelty of this article is thus to propose a method based on eigenvalue sensitivity analysis in order to characterize the influence of each possible communication link in improving the performance of the overall system. In addition, for a special class of systems and physical interconnection topology, explicit solutions on communication topology design are derived for the first time. The solutions provide some insights into how the heterogeneity of the subsystem local dynamics, the strength of interconnection and the size of the network affect the optimal communication topology.