A Technique for Designing Stabilizing Distributed Controllers with Arbitrary Signal Structure Constraints

This paper presents a new approach to distributed controller design that exploits a partial-structure representation of linear time invariant systems to characterize the structure of a system. This partial-structure representation, called the dynamical structure function, characterizes the {\em signal structure}, or open-loop causal dependencies among manifest variables, capturing a significantly richer notion of structure than the sparsity pattern of the transfer function. The design technique sequentially constructs each link in an arbitrary controller signal structure, and the main result proves that the resulting controller is either stabilizing or no controller with the desired structure can stabilize the system.