Reduction and Equivalence of Nonlinear Distributed Symmetric Control Systems

This paper considers the ‘reduction’ problem for large-scale distributed control systems. In particular, we consider control-theoretic concepts for control systems containing multiple instances of identical controllers or components where the overall system is invariant with respect to interchanging these identical components. The main results are invariance of controllability, motion planning and optimal control properties for an equivalence class of symmetric systems of this type.