by R. Marti, D. Sarabia, and C. de Prada

This chapter presents a distributed coordinated control algorithm based on a hierarchical scheme for systems consisting of nonlinear subsystems coupled by input constraints: the botton layer is composed of several non-linear model predictive controllers (NMPC) working in parallel, and in a top layer, a price-driven coordination technique is used to coordinate these controllers. The price coordination problem is formulated as a feedback control law to fulfill the global constraints that affect all NMPC controllers. To illustrate this approach, the price-driven coordination method is used to control a four-tank process in a distributed manner and is compared with centralized and fully decentralized approaches.