Distributed control of interconnected systems with event-based information requests*

This paper proposes a new approach to distributed control of physically interconnected subsystems which combines continuous and event-based state feedback. The main aim of the controller is to suppress the propagation of a disturbance within an interconnection of subsystems. The novelty of this approach is that the controllers request current state information from the neighboring systems at the event times. Events are generated based on a condition for which only local information are applied. The disturbance rejection behavior of the control approach with event-based information requests is demonstrated in an illustrative example which shows that the disturbance propagation is considerably reduced compared to a continuous decentralized state-feedback controller.