skip to main content
OSTI.GOV title logo U.S. Department of Energy
Office of Scientific and Technical Information

Title: Information structures for the control of large scale systems. Final technical report, September 1980-March 1984

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:6456184

Section 2 considers the implicit channels of communication and signaling strategies. By expanding the class of strategies, almost all channels would work. For linear systems with a special class of signaling strategies, namely, decentralized linear time invariant feedback, the completeness of the channel is needed. Section 3 investigates the decentralized control of linear systems. In systems with a special structure, namely the acyclic structure, the implicit network, though present, is not used. Signaling does not improve the performance of the system. Thus, the resulting control laws are fairly simple and can be computed in a sequential manner. In strongly connected systems, the agents are so tightly coupled that by signaling the system can be controlled from any agent. Such systems are thus natural candidates for centralized control. Section 4 considers the decentralized control of interconnected systems. Results for static and dynamic interconnections are given. When the exact values of the parameters in the system are not known, some structural properties in decentralized control are presented in Section 5. The concept of structural completeness is introduced and characterized. Section 6 reports a separation result on decentralized control. Emphasis in Section 7 shifts to the distributed estimation problem. Optimal fusion strategies for each agent to process the data are given for arbitrary communication networks. The current research in decentralized control is motivated by Witsenhausen's counterexample. A numerical solution to Witsenhausen's example is given in Section 8. The last two sections focus on the a priori structure of the control problem and attempt to relate the abstract decentralized control problem to some economic like models.

Research Organization:
Advanced Information and Decision Systems, Mountain View, CA (USA)
DOE Contract Number:
AC01-80RA50423
OSTI ID:
6456184
Report Number(s):
AI/DS/TR-1010-1; ON: DE86004773
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English