Einladung zum Vortrag im Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik

  Controller structure & non-smooth programming

Prof. Dr. Pierre Apkarian
Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse
Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse

Tuesday, 10. January 2012, 4:00 p.m.
IST-Seminar-Room 3.243 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

Controller structure turns out to be a key ingredient both in engineering applications as well as in the formulation of difficult synthesis problems in robust control theory. This presentation will conjointly address these topics. New techniques for tuning and synthesizing structured controllers are discussed. These techniques overcome some of the limitations of traditional H-infinity synthesis when practical implementation is the aim. They can be used to optimize arbitrary control architectures made of single- or multiple-loop control arrangements from a collection of structured control elements including PIDs, reduced-order state-space models, transfer functions, as well as custom controller blocks. Computing such highly structured controllers is based on specialized non-smooth optimization techniques with local certificate. While the underlying optimization program are typically NP-hard the proposed techniques reveal efficient and reliable in practice. We shall address both physical and abstract control structures and give a brief account of the non-smooth algorithm as developed in the MATLAB Robust Control Toolbox (routines HINFSTRUCT and LOOPTUNE).

Biographical Information

Pierre Apkarian received the Ph.D. degree in control engineering from the École Nationale Supérieure de l’Aéronautique et de l’Espace (ENSAE), France, in 1988. He was qualified as a Professor from Université Paul Sabatier (UPS) in both control engineering and applied mathematics in 1999 and 2001, respectively. Since 1988, he has been a Research Scientist at ONERA (Office National d'Études et de Recherches Aérospatiales) and an Associate Professor at Institut de Mathématiques, UPS. His research interests include robust and gain-scheduling control theory and LMI methods. More recently, his research has focused on the development of specialized non-smooth programming techniques for control system design. Pierre Apkarian has served as an associate editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control and contributed to the non-smooth synthesis tools in the Robust Control Toolbox of MATLAB.