An interaction measure for control configuration selection for multivariable bilinear systems

Control configuration selection is the procedure of choosing the appropriate input and output pairs for the design of decoupled (SISO or block) controllers for multivariable systems. This step is an important prerequisite for a successful industrial control strategy. In industrial practice it is often the case that systems which need to be controlled are non-linear, and linear models are insufficient to describe the behavior of the processes. The focus of this paper is on the problem of control configuration selection for a class of non-linear systems which is known as bilinear systems. A gramian-based interaction measure for control configuration selection of MIMO bilinear processes is described. In general, most of the results on the control configuration selection, which have been proposed so far, can only support linear systems. The proposed gramian-based interaction measure not only supports bilinear processes but also can be used to propose a richer sparse or block diagonal controller structure. The method is illustrated further with the help of some illustrative examples.