Fundamental Limitations of Control and Filtering in Continuous-Time Systems: An Information-Theoretic Analysis

Abstract: While information theory has been introduced to investigate and characterize the control and filtering limitations for a few decades, the existing information-theoretic methods are indirect and cumbersome for analyzing the fundamental limitations of continuous-time systems. To answer this challenge, we lift the information-theoretic analysis to continuous function spaces of infinite dimensions by using Duncan's theorem or the I-MMSE relationships. Continuous-time control and filtering systems are modeled as an additive Gaussian channel with or without feedback, and total information rate is identified as a control and filtering trade-off metric and directly computed from the estimation error of channel input. Inequality constraints for the trade-off metric are derived in a general setting and then applied to capture the fundamental limitations of various control and filtering systems subject to linear and nonlinear plants. For the linear systems, we show that total information rate has similar properties as some established trade-offs, e.g., Bode-type integrals and minimum estimation error. For the nonlinear systems, we provide a direct method to compute the total information rate and its lower bound by the Stratonovich-Kushner equation.