Plant order reduction for controller design

Two dual methods of plant order reduction for controller design are proposed for linear, time-invariant, multi-input multi-output systems. The model reduction methods are tailored towards closed-loop stability and performance and they yield estimates for the stability robustness and performance of the final design. They can be considered as formalizations of two classical heuristic model reduction techniques: One method neglects a plant-pole sufficiently far to the left of dominant poles and the other cancels a sufficiently small stable plant-zero with a pole at the origin.