Distributed predictive control of continuous-time systems

In the last years focus has been put in the development of distributed Model Predictive Control (MPC) algorithms. With a few exceptions, they have been mostly developed in the discrete-time framework. However, discretization of large-scale systems may destroy the sparsity of the original continuous-time models, making distributed control design and implementation more difficult. Also, more in general, discrete-time control of continuous-time systems does not allow to consider the process inter-sampling behavior. In this paper we present a novel non-cooperative distributed predictive control algorithm for continuous-time systems based on robust MPC concepts. The convergence properties of the proposed control scheme are stated, and its realizability is tested through a simulation case study.