Distributed finite-time state estimation of interconnected complex metabolic networks (Q1649533)

Summary: A set of distributed robust finite-time state observers is developed and tested to estimate the main biochemical substances in interconnected metabolic networks with complex structure. The finite-time estimator is designed by composing several supertwisting based step-by-step state observers. This segmented structure is proposed accordingly to the partition of metabolic network obtained as a result of applying the observability analysis of the model used to represent metabolic networks. The observer is developed under the assumption that a sufficient and small number of intracellular compounds can be obtained by some feasible analytic techniques. These techniques are enlisted to demonstrate the feasibility of designing the proposed observer. A set of numerical simulations is proposed to test the observer design over the hydrogen producing metabolic behavior of \textit{Escherichia coli}. The numerical evaluations show the superior performance of the observer (on recovering immeasurable state values) over classical approaches (high gain). The variations of internal metabolites inserted in the hydrogen productive metabolic networks are collected from databases. This information supplied to the observer serves to validate its ability to recover the time evolution of nonmeasurable metabolites.