Anti-Windup Coordination Strategy Around a Fair Equilibrium in Resource Sharing Networks

We coordinate interconnected agents where the control input of each agent is limited by the control input of others. In that sense, the systems have to share a limited resource over a network. Such problems can arise in different areas and it is here motivated by a district heating example. When the shared resource is insufficient for the combined need of all systems, the resource will have to be shared in an optimal fashion. In this scenario, we want the systems to automatically converge to an optimal equilibrium. The contribution of this letter is the proposal of a control architecture where each separate system is controlled by a local PI controller. The controllers are then coordinated through a global rank-one anti-windup signal. It is shown that the equilibrium of the proposed closed-loop system minimizes the infinity-norm of stationary state deviations. A proof of linear-domain passivity is given, and a numerical example highlights the benefits of the proposed method with respect to the state-of-the-art.