A graph-informed regret metric for optimal distributed control

Abstract

We consider the optimal control of large-scale systems using distributed controllers whose network topology mirrors the coupling graph between subsystems. In this work, we introduce spatial regret, a graph-informed metric measuring the worst-case performance gap between a distributed controller and an oracle with access to additional sensor information. The oracle's graph is a user-specified augmentation of the information graph, yielding a benchmark policy that penalizes disturbances for which additional sensing would improve performance. Minimizing spatial regret yields distributed controllers - respecting the nominal information graph - that emulate the oracle's response to disturbances characteristic of large-scale networks, such as localized perturbations. We show that minimizing spatial regret admits a convex reformulation as an infinite program with a finite-dimensional approximation. To scale to large networks, we derive an upper bound on the spatial regret that can be efficiently minimized in a distributed way. Numerical experiments on power-system models show that the resulting controllers mitigate localized disturbances more effectively than those based on classical metrics.