Distributed Control of Networked Systems with Nonlinear Dynamics and Coupling Constraints

This paper introduces a distributed control strategy for constraint-coupled networked systems with nonlinear dynamics. Problems of this type are often too complicated to be solved in a centralized way, such that efficient distributed solution is required. The proposed method first casts the global problem into a mixed-integer programming (MIP) problem, and then solves the MIP problem by use of recently developed distributed solution schemes for this problem class. A reduction of the computational complexity compared to the centralized solution as well as the satisfaction of all constraints are guaranteed, and its efficiency is illustrated for a numeric example.