Decentralized Design and Plug-and-Play Distributed Control for Linear Multi-Channel Systems.

In this paper, we propose a distributed output-feedback controller design for a linear time-invariant plant interacting with networked agents, where interaction and communication of each agent are limited to its associated input-output channel and its neighboring agents, respectively. The design scheme has a decentralized structure so that each agent can self-organize its own controller using the locally accessible information only. Furthermore, under mild conditions, the proposed controller is capable of maintaining stability even when agents join/leave the network during the operation without requiring any manipulation on other agents. This 'plug-and-play' feature leads to efficiency for controller maintenance as well as resilience against changes in interconnections. The key idea enabling these features is the use of Bass' algorithm, which allows the distributed computation of stabilizing gains by solving a Lyapunov equation in a distributed manner.