Discrete-time optimal control of systems with unilateral time-delays (Q1092859)

Industrial plants which contain a unilateral flow of material are considered. First, it is shown that such plants can be represented by finite-dimensional difference equations after sampling. Then, the design of discrete-time optimal control systems is studied based on the difference equations. The main difficulty in this design problem is the high dimensionality resulting from the discretization of long delays. In this paper, a new algorithm to solve the discrete Riccati equation for this class of systems is proposed. An example is given to illustrate how the computational difficulties are effectively reduced.