FIXED STRUCTURE CONTROLLER DESIGN FOR A CLASS OF SPATIALLY INTERCONNECTED SYSTEMS

This paper first considers the analysis of a spatially distributed controller for a spatially interconnected parameter-varying (SIPV) large scale system using a linear parameter-varying (LPV) framework. The concept of quadratic separators has been extended to compute a measure of worst-case performance for such systems by solving a linear matrix inequality (LMI) problem. The use of quadratic separator helps in using parameter dependent Lyapunov function in a systematic way which leads to less conservative controllers. The problem of synthesizing spatially distributed robust or gain-scheduled controllers for such systems leads to a bilinear matrix inequality and a hybrid evolutionary-LMI approach to solving this problem, based on LMI solvers and genetic algorithms, is proposed in this paper. Main advantage of this approach over other proposed approaches is that it is independent of controller structure. A design example illustrates the efficiency of the proposed method, where two controllers with different structures are synthesized.