Networked decentralized control of multirate sample-data systems

The vast progress in network technology over the past decade has certainly influenced the area of control systems. Nowadays, it is becoming more common to use networks in systems, especially in those that are large scale and physically distributed or that require extensive cabling. A network-based decentralized control of multirate sampled-data systems approach is introduced and analyzed as an effectiveness solution to the control problem of large-scale continuous-time plant. The main idea is that of information exchange among the various input-output channels of a complex system throughout a local area network. The chapter analyzes the stabilization problem for decentralized control of a large-scale continuous-time plant with different sampling rates in the input-output plant channels. Existence conditions and synthesis procedures are introduced and discussed. The results on the analysis and control of periodic discrete-time systems are used for finding such solutions. The chapter ends with some remarks on the possible extensions to the robust stabilization for the decentralized control of multirate sampled-data systems.