Decentralized Implementation of Centralized Controllers for Interconnected Systems

Given a centralized controller associated with a linear time-invariant (LTI) interconnected system, this paper is concerned with designing a parameterized decentralized controller in such a way that the state and input of the system under the obtained decentralized controller can become arbitrarily close to those of the system under the given centralized controller, by tuning the controller's parameters. To this end, a two-level decentralized controller is designed, where the upper level captures the dynamics of the centralized closed-loop system, and the lower level is an observed-based subcontroller designed based on the new notion of structural initial value observability. The proposed method can decentralize every generic centralized controller, provided the interconnected system satisfies very mild conditions.