Control of spatially interconnected systems with random communication losses

This paper deals with analysis and synthesis problems of spatially interconnected systems where communicated information may get lost between subsystems. Spatial shift operator and temporal forward shift operator are introduced to model the interconnected systems as discrete time-space multidimensional linear systems with Markovian jumping parameters which reflect the state of communication channels. To ensure the whole system's well-posedness and mean square stability for a given packet loss rate, a condition is derived through analysis. Then a procedure of designing distributed dynamic output feedback controllers is proposed. The controllers have the same structure as the plants and are solved within the linear matrix inequality (LMI) framework. Finally, we apply these results to study the effect of communication losses on the multiple vehicle platoon control system, which further illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed model and method.