Decentralized control: Status and outlook

This paper reviews state of the art in the area of decentralized networked control systems with an emphasis on event-triggered approach. The models or agents with the dynamics of linear continuous-time time-invariant state-space systems are considered. They serve for the framework for network phenomena within two basic structures. The I/O-oriented systems as well as the interaction-oriented systems with disjoint subsystems are distinguished. The focus is laid on the presentation of recent decentralized control design and co-design methods which offer effective tools to overcome specific difficulties caused mainly by network imperfections. Such side-effects include communication constraints, variable sampling, time-varying transmission delays, packet dropouts, and quantizations. Decentralized time-triggered methods are briefly discussed. The review is deals mainly with decentralized event-triggered methods. Particularly, the stabilizing controller-observer event-based controller design as well as the decentralized state controller co-design are presented within the I/O-oriented structures of large scale complex systems. The sampling instants depend in this case only on a local information offered by the local feedback loops. Minimum sampling time conditions are discussed. Special attention is focused on interaction-oriented system architecture. Model-based approach combined with event-based state feedback controller design is presented, where the event thresholds are fully decentralized. Finally, several selected open decentralized control problems are briefly offered as recent research challenges. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.