Distributed receding horizon control of large-scale nonlinear systems: Handling communication delays and disturbances

This paper studies the robust distributed receding horizon control (DRHC) problem for large-scale continuous-time nonlinear systems subject to communication delays and external disturbances. A dual-mode robust DRHC strategy is designed to deal with the communication delays and the external disturbances simultaneously. The feasibility of the proposed DRHC and the stability of the closed-loop system are analyzed, and the sufficient conditions for ensuring the feasibility and stability are developed, respectively. We show that: (1) the feasibility is affected by the bounds of external disturbances, the sampling period and the bound of communication delays; (2) the stability is related to the bounds of external disturbances, the sampling period, the bound of communication delays and the minimum eigenvalues of the cooperation matrices; (3) the closed-loop system is stabilized into a robust invariant set under the proposed conditions. A simulation study is conducted to verify the theoretical results.