Fixed-structure Control of LTI Systems with Polytopic-type Uncertainty

This thesis focuses on the development of robust control solutions for linear time-invariant interconnected systems affected by polytopic-type uncertainty. The main issues involved in the control of such systems, e.g. sensor and actuator placement, control configuration selection, and robust fixed-structure control design are included. The problem of fixed-structure control is intrinsically nonconvex and hence computationally intractable. Nevertheless, the problem has attracted considerable attention due to the great importance of fixed-structure controllers in practice. In this thesis, necessary and sufficient conditions for fixed-structure H_inf control of polytopic systems with a single uncertain parameter in terms of a finite number of bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs) are developed. Increasing the number of uncertain parameters leads to sufficient BMI conditions, where the number of decision variables grows polynomially. Convex approximations of robust fixed-order and fixed-structure controller design which rely on the concept of strictly positive realness (SPRness) of transfer functions in state space setting are presented. Such approximations are based on the use of slack matrices whose duty is to decouple the product of unknown matrices. Several algorithms for determination and update of the slack matrices are given. It is shown that the problem of sensor and actuator placement in the polytopic interconnected systems can be formulated as an optimization problem by minimizing cardinality of some pattern matrices, while satisfying a guaranteed level of H_inf performance. The control configuration design is achieved by solving a convex optimization problem whose solution delivers a trade-off curve that starts with a centralized controller and ends with a decentralized or a distributed controller. The proposed approaches are applied to inverter-interfaced microgrids which consist of distributed generation (DG) units. To this end, two important control problems associated with the microgrids are considered: (i) Current control of grid-connected voltage-source converters with L/LCL filters and (ii) Voltage control of islanded microgrids. The proposed control strategies are able to independently regulate the direct and quadrature (dq) components of the converter currents and voltages at the point of common couplings (PCC) in a fully decoupled manner and provide satisfactory dynamic responses. The important problem of plug-and-play (PnP) capability of DGs in the microgrids is also studied. It is shown that an inverter-interfaced microgrid consisting of multi DGs under PnP functionality can be cast as a system with polytopic-type uncertainty. By virtue of this novel description and use of the results from theory of robust control, the stability of the microgrid system under PnP operation of DGs is preserved. Extensive case studies, based on time-domain simulations in MATLAB/SimPowerSystems Toolbox, are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed controllers under various test scenarios, e.g., load change, voltage and current tracking. Real-time hardware-in-the-loop case studies, using RT-LAB real-time platform of OPAL-RT Technologies, are also conducted to validate the performance of the designed controllers and demonstrate their insensitivity to hardware implementation issues, e.g., noise and PWM non-idealities. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate satisfactory performance of the designed controllers.