Abstract

This talk focuses on the problem of designing optimal distributed

controllers for large-scale and spatially distributed systems. The

search for the optimal controller is restricted to the set of

controllers with a given "local" communication architecture, e.g. those

with only access to information from neighboring subsystems. The

general problem of finding optimal distributed controllers under

arbitrary communication architectures is yet unsolved. However, we

demonstrate that a certain choice of the communication architecture

leads to a tractable, though non-convex, optimization problem. We then

use a Steiglitz-McBride (SM) relaxation to render the problem convex in

the controller parameters.