Distributed Control of Constrained Compartmental Systems, with Applications to Large-Scale Infrastructures

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

The research objective of this project is to develop novel regulation methods for linear compartmental networked systems, which can directly and jointly address the physical and communication constraints typically imposed on these systems. Compartmental systems can be thought of as a collection of interconnected reservoirs exchanging flows of some material according to global conservation laws. Because this material represents a physical quantity such as a number of vehicles or a mass of fluid these regulation methods must be able to generate the desired closed-loop behavior without producing commands requiring these variables to become negative. In addition, communication between various reservoirs is often limited, and the commands must thus be computed based on local measurements only. The proposed approach builds on tools from the theory of robust and nonlinear control, and exploits the particular structure of compartmental systems to make design problems tractable for large problems, while incorporating time-varying parameter variations, random perturbations, and uncertainties. Particular effort and attention will be focused on the application of these methods to set-point regulation, output tracking, and disturbance rejection in compartmental models recently proposed for air traffic flow in the National Airspace System and large-scale, gravity driven, irrigation networks. Due to the wide range of processes that can be modeled as compartmental systems, we expect the tools resulting from the proposed research to benefit many important technical and societal applications in addition to irrigation networks and air traffic flow control. Examples include chemical production processes and some distributed computing scenarios. The technical results will be disseminated within the air traffic control community through close collaboration with the NASA Ames research center. Undergraduate students will be actively involved in the construction of an Irrigation Board testbed for irrigation simulation and its validation. This testbed will also be used as a teaching device, as part of a course for local high school students on the challenges of water conservation and its possible engineering solutions.