Distributed RHC of nonlinear systems: Handling delays and disturbances

The practical design of distributed control systems is likely to encounter some issues, such as communication constraints and environmental disturbances. In this chapter, we consider the robust distributed RHC problem for large-scale continuous-time nonlinear systems subject to communication delays and external disturbances. A dual-mode robust distributed RHC strategy is designed to deal with the communication delays and the external disturbances simultaneously. The feasibility of the proposed distributed RHC 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 robustly invariant set under the proposed conditions. A simulation study is conducted to verify the theoretical results.