Information sharing among local controllers is the key feature of any Distributed Model Predictive Control (DMPC) strategy. This paper addresses the problem of communication failures in DMPC strategies and proposes a distributed solution to cope with them. The proposal consists in an information-exchange protocol that is based on distributed projection dynamics. By applying this protocol as a complementary plug-in to a DMPC strategy, the controllers improve the resilience against communication failures and relax the requirements of the communication network. Furthermore, a reconfiguration algorithm, which is a contingency procedure to maintain the connectivity of the network, and a discussion on the selection criteria of the information-sharing network are also presented. In order to demonstrate the performance and advantages of the proposed approach when it is applied to a DMPC strategy, a case study of a power-network control problem is provided.

Peer Reviewed