The role of communication delays in the optimal control of spatially invariant systems

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ballotta, Luca, Arbelaiz, Juncal, Gupta, Vijay, Schenato, Luca, Jovanović, Mihailo R.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866912582176079872
author Ballotta, Luca
Arbelaiz, Juncal
Gupta, Vijay
Schenato, Luca
Jovanović, Mihailo R.
author_facet Ballotta, Luca
Arbelaiz, Juncal
Gupta, Vijay
Schenato, Luca
Jovanović, Mihailo R.
contents We study optimal proportional feedback controllers for spatially invariant systems when the controller has access to delayed state measurements received from different spatial locations. We analyze how delays affect the spatial locality of the optimal feedback gain leveraging the problem decoupling in the spatial frequency domain. For the cases of expensive control and small delay, we provide exact expressions of the optimal controllers in the limit for infinite control weight and vanishing delay, respectively. In the expensive control regime, the optimal feedback control law decomposes into a delay-aware filtering of the delayed state and the optimal controller in the delay-free setting. Under small delays, the optimal controller is a perturbation of the delay-free one which depends linearly on the delay. We illustrate our analytical findings with a reaction-diffusion process over the real line and a multi-agent system coupled through circulant matrices, showing that delays reduce the effectiveness of optimal feedback control and may require each subsystem within a distributed implementation to communicate with farther-away locations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_09269
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle The role of communication delays in the optimal control of spatially invariant systems
Ballotta, Luca
Arbelaiz, Juncal
Gupta, Vijay
Schenato, Luca
Jovanović, Mihailo R.
Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
Analysis of PDEs
93C43 (Primary) 49N10 (Secondary)
We study optimal proportional feedback controllers for spatially invariant systems when the controller has access to delayed state measurements received from different spatial locations. We analyze how delays affect the spatial locality of the optimal feedback gain leveraging the problem decoupling in the spatial frequency domain. For the cases of expensive control and small delay, we provide exact expressions of the optimal controllers in the limit for infinite control weight and vanishing delay, respectively. In the expensive control regime, the optimal feedback control law decomposes into a delay-aware filtering of the delayed state and the optimal controller in the delay-free setting. Under small delays, the optimal controller is a perturbation of the delay-free one which depends linearly on the delay. We illustrate our analytical findings with a reaction-diffusion process over the real line and a multi-agent system coupled through circulant matrices, showing that delays reduce the effectiveness of optimal feedback control and may require each subsystem within a distributed implementation to communicate with farther-away locations.
title The role of communication delays in the optimal control of spatially invariant systems
topic Optimization and Control
Systems and Control
Analysis of PDEs
93C43 (Primary) 49N10 (Secondary)
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09269