Optimal controller synthesis for the decentralized two-player problem with output feedback

Laurent Lessard, Sanjay Lall

Abstract: In this paper, we present a controller synthesis algorithm for a decentralized control problem. We consider an architecture in which there are two interconnected linear subsystems. Both controllers seek to optimize a global quadratic cost, despite having access to different subsets of the available measurements. Many special cases of this problem have previously been solved, most notably the state-feedback case. The generalization to output-feedback is nontrivial, as the classical separation principle does not hold. Herein, we present the first explicit state-space realization for an optimal controller for the general two-player problem.