Systems composed of large ensembles of isolated or interacted dynamic units are prevalent in nature and engineered infrastructures. Linear ensemble systems are inarguably the simplest class of ensemble systems and have attracted intensive attention to control theorists and practionars in the past years. Comprehensive understanding of dynamic properties of such systems yet remains far-fetched and requires considerable knowledge and techniques beyond the reach of modern control theory. In this paper, we explore the classes of linear ensemble systems with system matrices that are not globally diagonalizable. In particular, we focus on analyzing their controllability properties under a Sobolev space setting and develop conditions under which uniform controllability of such ensemble systems is equivalent to that of their diagonalizable counterparts. This development significantly facilitates controllability analysis for linear ensemble systems through examining diagonalized linear systems.
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Sparse Linear Ensemble Systems and Structural Controllability
The paper introduces and solves a structural controllability problem for continuum ensembles of linear time-invariant systems. All the individual linear systems of an ensemble are sparse, governed by the same sparsity pattern. Controllability of an ensemble system is, by convention, the capability of using a common control input to simultaneously steer every individual systems in it. A sparsity pattern is structurally controllable if it admits a controllable linear ensemble system. A main contribution of the paper is to provide a graphical condition that is necessary and sufficient for a sparsity pattern to be structurally controllable. Like other structural problems, the property of being structural controllable is monotone. We provide a complete characterization of minimal sparsity patterns as well.
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- PAR ID:
- 10319635
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control
- ISSN:
- 0018-9286
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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