A New Decentralized Model Reference Adaptive Control for a Class of Interconnected Multivariable Plants

In the field of decentralized adaptive control, there still has not been researched which deal with model reference adaptive control (MRAC) of interconnected multivariable plants. Through appropriate parametrization process of each isolated multivariable subsystem, this paper shows that by combining the decentralized MRAC schemes [8] with a variable structure control law [2] the output tracking error will converge to zero in finite time in the presence of interconnections among subsystems which may be nonlinear and time-varying with any possible strengths.