Mitigation of communication failures in distributed model predictive control strategies

Abstract

Information sharing among local controllers is the key feature of any Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) strategy. This paper addresses the problem of communication failures in DMPC strategies and proposes a distributed solution to cope with them. The proposal consists in an information-exchange protocol that is based on distributed projection dynamics. By applying this protocol as a complementary plug-in to a DMPC strategy, the controllers improve the resilience against communication failures and relax the requirements of the communication network. Furthermore, a reconfiguration algorithm, which is a contingency procedure to maintain the connectivity of the network, and a discussion on the selection criteria of the information-sharing network are also presented. In order to demonstrate the performance and advantages of the proposed approach when it is applied to a DMPC strategy, a case study of a power-network control problem is provided.