Hierarchical design of decentralized receding horizon controllers for decoupled systems

In our recent paper (2004), we have proposed a method for designing decentralized receding horizon controllers (RHC). Each RHC controller is associated to a different node and computes the local control inputs based only on the states of the node and of its neighbors. For such a decentralized scheme, stability and feasibility can be ensured in different ways, by modifying cost, constraints and communications structure. In this paper, we focus on decentralized RHC control design through hierarchical decomposition. A certain priority is assigned to each node of the graph and nodes with high priorities compute control laws for nodes with lower priorities. We study how to ensure stability and feasibility of such scheme when the explicit feasibility domains of the decentralized RHC are available. Moreover, we propose a hierarchical RHC control scheme with stability and feasibility guarantees.