Analysis and design of decentralized control systems in the presence of uncertain latency or system parameters

本研究致力于分散反馈控制系统的分析与设计。这样的系统包括：电网、无线网络和医疗远程机器人。在这些应用中，分布式信息收集正在进行，但决策通常是使用总信息的小子集在本地进行的。这项研究的重点是在存在不确定性的情况下控制分散的系统，不确定性可以是子系统间通信延迟的不确定性，也可以是子系统本身的动态或参数的不确定性。该项目的智力优势是促进了分散控制科学的基础知识，并产生了计算上有效的控制算法。这项研究有可能影响几个不同的应用领域，并为工程师和系统设计者提供实践指导。最优分散控制通常很难解决，但某些广泛的问题可以有效地解决。该项目将利用这些可处理实例的最新结构结果，目标是阐明通用体系结构，这些体系结构允许在面对子系统的不确定性或通信延迟时进行简单的适应。为了实现这一目标，该项目将运用最优控制、稳健和非线性控制、时滞系统和分散控制等领域的工具和见解。

This research addresses the analysis and design of decentralized feedback control systems. Such systems include: the power grid, wireless networks, and medical tele-robotics. In these applications, distributed information-gathering is taking place but decision-making is often made locally using small subsets of the total information. The emphasis of this research is on controlling decentralized systems in the presence of uncertainty, which can be uncertainty in inter-subsystem communication latency or uncertainty in the dynamics or parameters of the subsystems themselves. The intellectual merits of this project are to advance foundational knowledge in the science of decentralized control and to produce computationally efficient control algorithms. This research has the potential to impact several different application areas and to serve as a guide to practice for engineers and system designers.Optimal decentralized control is generally intractable, yet certain broad classes of problems can be efficiently solved. This project will leverage recent structural results for these tractable instances with the goal of elucidating universal architectures that allow for simple adaptations in the face of uncertainty in the subsystems or latency in their communication. To achieve this goal, the project will bring to bear tools and insights from the fields of optimal control, robust and nonlinear control, delayed systems, and decentralized control.