Decentralized Design and Plug-and-Play Distributed Control for Linear Multichannel Systems

We propose a distributed control, in which many identical control agents are deployed for controlling a linear time-invariant plant that has multiple input–output channels. Each control agent can join or leave the control loop during the operation of stabilization without particular initialization over the whole networked agents. Once new control agents join the loop, they self-organize their control dynamics, which does not interfere the control by other active agents, which is achieved by local communication with the neighboring agents. The key idea enabling these features is the use of Bass' algorithm, which allows the distributed computation of stabilizing gains by solving a Lyapunov equation in a distributed manner.