Design of a decentralized output feedback control law by solving a linear least squares problem

We study the output feedback control problem using a decentralized dynamic feedback control scheme. We propose a numerical procedure which consists of an evaluation of the decentralized feedback gains such that the closed-loop behaviour of the decentralized system approaches, in the least squares sense, the evolution of a target centralized closed-loop plant. In this way, the synthesis problem reduces to the identification of a set of unknown parameters in a linear system of ordinary differential equations. Since the time derivatives of the target states can also be computed, the solution can be determined by solving a linear least squares problem, where no difficulty due to local minima and good initial estimate occur.