
1
Gain-Scheduling Controller Synthesis for Nested
Systems with Full Block Scalings
Christian A. R ¨
osinger and Carsten W. Scherer, Fellow, IEEE
Abstract—This work presents a framework to synthe-
size structured gain-scheduled controllers for structured
plants whose dynamics change according to time-varying
scheduling parameters. Both the system and the controller
are assumed to admit descriptions in terms of a linear
time-invariant system in feedback with so-called schedul-
ing blocks, which collect all scheduling parameters into a
static system. We show that such linear fractional repre-
sentations permit to exploit a so-called lifting technique in
order to handle several structured gain-scheduling design
problems. These could arise from a nested inner and outer
loop control configuration with partial or full dependence
on the scheduling variables. Our design conditions are
formulated in terms of convex linear matrix inequalities and
permit to handle multiple performance objectives.
Index Terms—Control system synthesis, linear matrix
inequalities, decentralized control, optimal scheduling.
I. INTRODUCTION
IN this work, we consider gain-scheduled synthesis based
on linear fractional representations (LFRs) for the standard
configuration in Fig. 1, as motivated by the early works [1],
[2]. Here, G(∆) is a linear parametrically-varying (LPV) sys-
tem affected by some matrix-valued time-varying uncertainty
∆whose current value can change arbitrarily fast and is
measured online. For instance, in a concrete application, ∆can
represent the rotor speed of the generators of a wind turbine
[3], or the variation of the longitudinal speed in a car [4].
The philosophy of gain-scheduling synthesis [1], [2], [5]–[8]
is based on the idea to design a ∆-dependent controller K(∆)
in Fig. 1 which achieves better performance if compared to a
robust controller that does not depend on ∆.
We present a flexible synthesis framework encompassing
gain-scheduled problems for different nested interconnections
of LPV systems. As inspired by [9], one specific configuration
covered by our approach is shown in Fig. 2, to which we refer
as partial gain-scheduling in the sequel. This configuration
involves an outer loop with a linear time invariant (LTI)
Funded by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Re-
search Foundation) under Germany’s Excellence Strategy - EXC 2075
- 390740016. We acknowledge the support by the Stuttgart Center for
Simulation Science (SimTech).
The authors are with the Institute of Mathematical Methods in
the Engineering Sciences, Numerical Analysis and Geometrical Mod-
eling, Department of Mathematics, University of Stuttgart, 70569
Stuttgart, Germany (e-mail: christian.roesinger@imng.uni-stuttgart.de,
carsten.scherer@imng.uni-stuttgart.de). (Corresponding author: Chris-
tian A. R¨
osinger.)
Fig. 1. Gain-scheduling configuration
plant P2and a controller C2, interconnected with a gain-
scheduled inner loop consisting of an LPV system P1(∆)
and a scheduled controller C1(∆). Note that the outer loop
with P2and C2is affected by P1(∆) and C1(∆) by one-
sided communication links ξand η, respectively. Such nested
configurations are of practical interest, e.g., in the control of
induction motors [10], where the physical constraints impose
a fast ∆-dependent inner loop with ∆being the rotor speed
of the motor, and a slow outer mechanical loop. Further, our
framework permits us to handle the case that P2=P2(∆) and
C2=C2(∆) are also ∆-dependent in Fig. 2, which is called
triangular gain-scheduling for reasons to be seen later. Such
structures emerge, for instance, in a wind park if wind turbines
are interacting in a nested fashion and where ∆depends on
the wind speed and some torque coefficients [11].
Since we are interested in embedding these problems into a
unifying framework for analysis and synthesis, we show how
to translate these nested configurations into Fig. 1 by making
use of the flexibility of LFRs. This leads to controller design
problems for particularly structured G(∆) and K(∆). One of
the main contributions of this work is to show, for the first
time, that these structured design problems can be solved by
convex optimization techniques. This is achieved through a
general design framework for nested gain-scheduled control
problems based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs).
Moreover, a central aspect of our design framework lies in
the flexibility for handling a combination of different criteria
in one shot, such as, e.g., stability, H∞-and H2-performance
objectives. Since H2-control requires to guarantee finiteness
of the closed-loop norm, we also show how to incorporate the
recent approaches [12], [13] based on D-, positive real and
full block scalings into our framework. These works focus on
a certain structured H2-design problem to render the direct
feedthrough term of wp→zpzero in Fig. 1, which in turn
guarantees finiteness of the closed-loop H2-norm by design.
On the one hand, if P1(∆) and C1(∆) are ∆-independent
LTI systems in Fig. 2, LMI solutions are given for nominal,
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reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2023.3329851
arXiv:2210.03712v3 [math.OC] 29 Nov 2023