Nonconservative Distributed Control Over Real-Time Network Links

Communication technologies are being continuously developed to provide improved support of real-time links for an industrial Internet of Things. This article considers a general and flexible distributed control architecture over real-time links. No bounds are assumed on the value of delays that are modeled as random variables. An accurate modeling and analysis framework is provided and the exact value of a control performance cost function is calculated. The results provide the required tools for optimization-based design of distributed networked control systems. A case study is presented in which networked controllers are designed based on the consensus algorithm for coordination of multiple parallel power electronic converters. It is shown that consideration of the communication effects in the controller design process is crucial for achieving superior performance.