l/sub 1/-suboptimal pole placement design

We incorporate an arbitrary number of "candidate" positive distinct poles into the scalar l/sub 1/ optimization framework in order to obtain low-order rational suboptimal solutions to constrained l/sub 1/ optimization problems. Our approach uses a single linear program to minimize an upper bound on the l/sub 1/ norm and gives a solution which uses only the best out of the prespecified poles. Rational suboptimal solutions to a scalar two-block problem are obtained similarly.