Dynamic Event-Sampled Control of Interconnected Nonlinear Systems Using Reinforcement Learning

We develop a decentralized dynamic event-based control strategy for nonlinear systems subject to matched interconnections. To begin with, we introduce a dynamic event-based sampling mechanism, which relies on the system's states and the variables generated by time-based differential equations. Then, we prove that the decentralized event-based controller for the whole system is composed of all the optimal event-based control policies of nominal subsystems. To derive these optimal event-based control policies, we design a critic-only architecture to solve the related event-based Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equations in the reinforcement learning framework. The implementation of such an architecture uses only critic neural networks (NNs) with their weight vectors being updated through the gradient descent method together with concurrent learning. After that, we demonstrate that the asymptotic stability of closed-loop nominal subsystems and the uniformly ultimate boundedness stability of critic NNs' weight estimation errors are guaranteed by using Lyapunov's approach. Finally, we provide simulations of a matched nonlinear-interconnected plant to validate the present theoretical claims.