Distributed Control of Large-Scale Networked Control Systems With Communication Constraints and Topology Switching

This paper investigates the problem of sensor-network-based distributed control for large-scale networked control systems, in which the communication constraint and topology switching problems are addressed. In the considered system, a discrete-time interconnected process is controlled by a network of sensors, controllers, and actuators that collect information about the plant, and apply control actions to manage the plant dynamics. The motivation for this paper is that the communication between the plant network and the controller network can be exploited for the system-wide purpose. To deal with the communication constraint problem, strategies such as the event-based communication and logarithmic quantization are applied. Furthermore, in a networked environment, the real-time information of the topology switching is not always available at the controller network side, hence a bunch of synchronous/asynchronous controllers are designed such that the closed-loop system is exponentially stable and achieves a prescribed H
_∞
disturbance attenuation level. Finally, an illustrative example on a benchmark continuous stirred-tank reactor system is presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed new control technique.