Journal paper submitted to Automatica!
The paper “Optimal Decentralized State-Feedback Control with Sparsity and Delays” by Andrew Lamperski and me was submitted to Automatica. This paper concerns optimal decentralized controller synthesis for systems that satisfy a nested information structured. That is, for any two decision-makers, one must know strictly more than the other at every instant. Two ways in which this can happen are delays (information doesn’t propagate to everyone simultaneously) or sparsity (not all information reaches everybody). These two cases were studied independently by other researchers. In this work, we unify both bodies of work and show how to solve problems containing a mixture of both types of constraints. A preliminary version of this work appeared at the NecSys’12 Workshop. In this much-expanded journal submission, we include a new distributed implementation of the optimal controller, as well as new illustrative examples and in-depth discussions. Our paper is also available on arXiv.