Performance assessment of decentralized control systems: An iterative approach

In this work, an efficient approach for performance assessment of decentralized control systems based on a general quadratic performance index involving both system states and inputs is proposed. The performance assessment problem is formulated as an optimization problem subject to constraints in the form of linear/bilinear matrix inequalities which explicitly take the block-diagonal structural constraint on decentralized control systems into account. In order to solve the optimization problem efficiently, an iterative approach based on the original optimization problem and an equivalent transformation of the original one is proposed. Specifically, the proposed approach under the assumption that the full state feedback is available is first presented; and then the approach is extended to the case that only output feedback is available. The proposed approach solves for both the best achievable performance and the corresponding controller (and observer) gains. The application of the proposed approach to two examples including a reactor–separator chemical process example illustrates the applicability and effectiveness of the proposed approach.

► Performance assessment of decentralized control systems with a general quadratic LQG-type index.
► An efficient iterative approach for handling block-diagonal structural constrain on decentralized control systems.
► An efficient iterative approach for evaluation of decentralized steady-state Kalman filter gains.
► Two illustrative examples with extensive simulation results.