Decentralized state feedback control for interconnected process systems

We consider the problem of constructing decentralized state feedback controllers for linear continuous-time systems. Different from existing approaches, where the topology of the controller is fixed a-priori, the topology of the controller is part of the optimization problem. Structure optimization is done in terms of a minimization of the required feedback and subject to a predefined bound on the tolerable loss of the achieved Hinf-performance of the decentralized controller compared to an Hinf-optimal centralized controller. We develop a computationally efficient formulation of the decentralized control problem by convex relaxations which makes it attractive for practical applications.