Plug-and-Play Distributed Control of Large-Scale Nonlinear Systems

A method to design plug-and-play (PnP) distributed controllers for large-scale nonlinear systems represented by interconnected Takagi-Sugeno fuzzy models with nonlinear consequent is presented in this article. From the combination of techniques to use multiple fuzzy summations and to explore the chordal decomposition of the interconnection graph associated with the large-scale nonlinear system, sufficient conditions for distributed stabilization are derived in terms of linear matrix inequalities (LMIs). Conditions specially designed to allow seamless subsystems plugging-in and unplugging operations from the large-scale system, without requiring the redesign of all previously tuned distributed controllers, are provided. The approach can be used together with fault detection and isolation (FDI) systems, and also in the context of mixed distributed and decentralized controllers operating in a network of interconnected systems. To illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed PnP approach, a network of nonlinearly coupled and heterogeneous Van der Pol oscillators is used in the numerical experiments.