Decentralised adaptive architectures for control of large-scale active–passive modular systems with stability and performance guarantees

ABSTRACT

Decentralised control of large-scale active–passive modular systems is considered in this paper. The considered class of large-scale systems consist of physically interconnected and generally heterogeneous modules, where local control signals can only be applied to a subset of these modules (i.e. active modules) and the rest do not admit any control signals (i.e. passive modules). Specifically, based on a set-theoretic model reference adaptive control approach predicated on restricted potential functions, we design and analyse decentralised command following control laws for each active module such that they can effectively perform their tasks in the presence of unknown physical interconnections between modules and module-level system uncertainties. The key feature of our framework allows the system error trajectories of the active modules to be contained within a-priori, user-defined compact sets. Thus, they are guaranteed to achieve strict performance guarantees, where this is of paramount importance for practical applications. In addition to our theoretical findings and research contributions, the efficacy of the proposed decentralised adaptive control architecture is demonstrated in an illustrative numerical example.