The chapter proposes an innovative estimation&control scheme that enables the distributed monitoring and control of large-scale processes. The proposed approach considers a discrete linear time-invariant process controlled by a network of agents that may both, collect information about the evolution of the plant and apply control actions to drive its behavior. The problem makes full sense when local observability/controllability is not assumed and the communication between agents can be exploited to reach system-wide goals. Additionally, to reduce agents bandwidth requirements and power consumption, an event-based communication policy is studied. The design procedure guarantees system stability, allowing the designer to trade-off performance, control effort, and communication requirements. The obtained controllers and observers are implemented in a fully distributed fashion. To illustrate the performance of the proposed technique, experimental results on a quadruple-tank process are provided.
Part of ISBN 978-3-319-21298-2
QC 20241129