An Information Theoretic Approach to Regulation Systems

Based on the work of Enegell(1985), a novel approach to theanalaysis of control systems by means of information-theoreticalconcepts is presented. Using results from rate-distortion theory,the requisite variety of the regulator necessary for a certianperformance is derived. This theory is used to analyse feedbackregulation systems, in particular, the Minimum Variance Controllaw for linear systems with a quadratic performance criterion.The main result of this paper has implications for the evaluationof L-bounds on analytic functions.