Alternating direction method of multipliers in distributed control of a system of systems: Application to a quadruple tank plant

In System of Systems Engineering (SoSE), robustness and reliability are essential for operations under various conditions. Distributed control approaches demonstrate superior performance for handling changes in highly scalable systems, making them suitable for this context. The study explores the efficacy of the Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (ADMM) applied in a simulated case study and on a physical Quadruple Tank Plant system. In this work, a multi-agent coordination problem using the Model Predictive Control (MPC) paradigm, Linear Quadratic Tracking (LQT) techniques, and ADMM for the consensus has been formalized and a solution has been proposed as a control algorithm. During the experiments, there was no assumption of feasibility when the references were chosen. To improve the reliability of the controller, a Kalman filter to estimate the state has been added.