Decoupled Reference Governors: A Constraint Management Technique for MIMO Systems

Abstract: This paper presents a computationally efficient solution for constraint management of multi-input and multi-output (MIMO) systems. The solution, referred to as the Decoupled Reference Governor (DRG), maintains the highly-attractive computational features of Scalar Reference Governors (SRG) while having performance comparable to Vector Reference Governors (VRG). DRG is based on decoupling the input-output dynamics of the system, followed by the deployment of a bank of SRGs for each decoupled channel. We present two formulations of DRG: DRG-tf, which is based on system decoupling using transfer functions, and DRG-ss, which is built on state feedback decoupling. A detailed set-theoretic analysis of DRG, which highlights its main characteristics, is presented. We also show a quantitative comparison between DRG and the VRG to illustrate the computational advantages of DRG. The robustness of this approach to disturbances and uncertainties is also investigated.