Distributed Controller Design Aspects for Guaranteed Performance

In this paper we consider some design aspects of distributed controllers that guarantee a (H∞or H2) performance level. In particular, we consider two design problems. First is the case where, without loss of generality, there are two distributed subcontollers connected to a (generalized) plant and the interest is placed in minimizing the number of noise-free (and dynamics free) communication channels between the subcontrollers needed to provide a given performance. The second is the case where, given specific signals to be communicated among the subcontrollers, noise is present and we seek to guarantee a performance level while keeping the communication signal to noise power limited. We take an LMI approach to provide solution procedures to these problems and present examples that demonstrate their efficiency.