Distributed cooperative control for stretching process of web production system

As a key phase of web production system, stretching process pursues the target velocities of rollers and the web tensions of spans between the successive rollers to guarantee proper stretching ratios. This requires the stable velocities and velocity ratios of large number rollers separated throughout the workshop. To this goal, a distributed cooperative controller is designed to coordinate the velocities of rollers to the desired values and the target ratios between the upper and lower rollers. During the whole evolution, only the neighbor rollers can exchange the working information. No global information and central controller are required. All the rollers asymptotically achieve the desired velocity ratios via the proposed control law based on only the local information, which is demonstrated by both theoretical analysis and numerical simulations.