State variable representations in digital control systems with MA-prefiltered measurements

This paper derives three discrete state variable representations for a continuous-time plant driven by a zero-order hold with a combination of instantaneous measurements and measurements prefiltered by a multiinput/multioutput moving average (MA) process. These representations allow the control system engineer to model plants of this type accurately in a form which permits him to use standard techniques to design digital feedback controllers for them. An example is presented which illustrates how to obtain the coefficient matrices in each representation. Guidelines are presented for choosing the best representation to use for any given plant of this type.