Distributed Performance Boosting through Neural Control for Plug-and-Play Networks

We address the problem of improving the performance of pre-stabilized networked systems subject to plug-and-play (PnP) operations, namely additions or removals of subsystems. While distributed baseline controllers can preserve stability after a PnP transition, augmenting them with expressive neural policies can invalidate the formal stability guarantees. To overcome this issue, we build on recently proposed Performance Boosting controllers based on the Internal Model Control (IMC) principle, which reduce closed-loop stability to a finite 2-gain requirement on an auxiliary operator. In the distributed setting, this operator is formed by interconnecting local neural operators that exchange information only between neighboring subsystems. We then derive free parametrizations of this interconnection, namely explicit maps from unconstrained trainable variables to interconnected neural operators satisfying a prescribed network gain bound for every parameter value. The obtained distributed neural controller can therefore be trained by unconstrained gradient-based optimization without stability constraints or projection steps, while retaining the prescribed gain bound at every training iterate. We develop two complementary parametrizations. A neighbor-based compositional parametrization uses local coupling bounds, so that after a PnP event only subsystems whose bounds change need to update their gain parameters. A network-norm parametrization instead uses a bound on the overall coupling matrix and can reduce conservatism, at the price of requiring network-wide information. A PnP DC-microgrid case study shows that the proposed neural layer improves voltage transients under topology changes and load variations while preserving nominal closed-loop stability.