Synthesis of Optimal Dynamic Quantizers for Discrete-Valued Input Control

This paper presents an optimal dynamic quantizer synthesis method for controlling linear time-invariant systems with discrete-valued input. The quantizers considered here include dynamic feedback mechanism, for which we find quantizer parameters such that the system composed of a given linear plant and the quantizer is an optimal approximation of the linear plant in terms of the input-output relation. First, the performance of an arbitrarily given dynamic quantizer is analyzed, where we derive a closed form expression of the performance. Based on this result, it is shown that the quantizer design is reduced to a nonconvex optimization problem for which it is hard to obtain a solution in a direct way. We obtain a globally optimal solution, however, by taking advantage of a special structure of the problem which allows us to relax the original nonconvex problem. The resulting problem is easy to solve, so we provide a design method based on linear programming and derive an optimal structure of the dynamic quantizers. Finally, the validity of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical examples.