Explicit Reference Governor for the Constrained Control of Linear Time-Delay Systems

Abstract

This paper introduces an explicit reference governor to supervise closed-loop linear time-delay systems. The proposed scheme enforces state and input constraints by modifying the reference of the supervised system so that the state vector always belongs to admissible sublevel sets of a suitably defined Lyapunov–Krasovskii functional. To accomplish this, this paper extends the existing definition of “dynamic safety margin” to a time-delay setting and illustrates how to employ classic Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals even though the reference is time varying. Constraint enforcement for arbitrary reference signals and asymptotic convergence to any strictly steady-state admissible set point is rigorously proven. Experimental results are reported to demonstrate the simplicity, practicality, and robustness of the proposed method.