Modularized design for cooperative control and plug-and-play operation of networked heterogeneous systems

In this paper, a cooperative control analysis and design method is investigated for heterogeneous dynamical systems that may be of arbitrary relative degree or nonminimum-phase or both. To achieve consensus or cooperative stability, a negative value of input-feedforward passivity index is used to accommodate and analyze such systems, and the magnitude of the index value is also used as the impact coefficient to quantify the impacts of heterogeneous dynamics of these systems on their networked operations. Physical-system-level designs are explicitly carried out to make individual linear and nonlinear systems (which are either feedback linearizable or nonminimum phase of certain form) become passivity-short and to embed one pure integrator into their input–output dynamics. The network-level distributed control can simply be chosen without any knowledge of the heterogeneous dynamics but with only information of an upper bound on their impact coefficients. It is shown, using the impact equivalence principle, that these controls separately designed but implemented together always ensure either local or global consensus and that a global non-trivial consensus emerges if and only if the information network has at least one globally reachable node or is varying but cumulatively connected. The proposed methodology of fully modularized designs unravels complexity of analyzing and designing cyber–physical systems and enables their plug-and-play into networked operations.