Robust distributed control design for interconnected systems under topology uncertainty

This paper jointly designs the distributed control law and its communication architecture for large-scale interconnected systems. The novelty is to consider both, the robustness guaranty under topology uncertainty and the performance improvement of the overall system. The proposed framework consists of two steps. The first step aims at finding a set of stabilizing distributed control laws providing H
_∞
robust performance under topology uncertainty. In the second step the performance of the interconnected system is further improved by searching for the optimal communication topology within acquired set of distributed control laws. In this step, the design of communication architecture is achieved by minimizing the H
₂
norm. Additionally, a trade-off between performance improvement and communication cost is incorporated. Furthermore, to reduce computational complexity, a strategy to manipulate the existing communication links is proposed to deal with topology variation in the interconnected systems. Finally, the developed method is demonstrated via some examples.