Search for: All records

This paper is motivated by economic aspects of fixed initial and operating costs for control of spatially distributed systems. In particular, the paper investigates the possibility of a large number of inexpensive actuating and sensing devices, as an alternative to (a reduced number of) expensive high capacity devices. While such an alternative reduces the fixed initial costs associated with actuators and sensors, it may also lead to increased operating costs resulting from communication requirements between the now-networked actuator-sensor-control units. To simplify the controller architecture, a proportional controller is assumed that amounts to a static output feedback controller. In a network of n actuator-sensor pairs, an all-to-all communication topology results in a fully populated static output feedback matrix with as much as n(n-1) communication links. In addition to a traditional performance index used to obtain the static output feedback gain matrix, this paper proposes a mixed index wherein both the traditional performance index and the number of communication links (representing operating costs associated with information exchange links), are taken into account. As an example, the proposed scheme is applied to a parabolic partial differential equation having four actuator-sensor pairs. The resulting optimization produces a sparse static gain matrix with a communication topology that has half the graph edges of the fully connected case and with essentially the same performance.