Einladung zum Vortrag im Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik

  Lyapunov and invariance methods in control design

Prof. Dr. Franco Blanchini
Department of Mathematics and Computer Science
University of Udine

Tuesday, 24. April 2012, 4:00 p.m.
IST-Seminar-Room 3.243 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

Many control problems can be naturally formulated, analyzed and solved in a set--theoretic context. Sets appear naturally when three aspects, which are crucial in control systems design, are considered: constraints, uncertainties and design specifications. Furthermore sets are the most appropriate language to specify several system performances, for instance when we are interested in determining the domain of attraction, in measuring the effect of a persistent noise in a feedback loop or in bounding the error of an estimation algorithm. Generally speaking, in the control theory context, all the techniques which are theoretically based on some properties of subsets of the state--space could be referred to as set--theoretic methods. The most popular and clear link is that with the Lyapunov theory and positive invariance. These techniques have been presented for the first time around forty years ago but it is quite important to revise them in a renewed light, especially in view of the modern computing possibilities.
The main purpose of this talk is to survey the set theoretic approach for the control and analysis of dynamic systems from both a theoretical and practical standpoint, with special regards to the connections with important areas in control theory including constrained control, robust control, disturbance rejection and robust estimation. The talk will be centered on the crucial issue of computational complexity and the conservativity of the set--theoretic techniques. In particular a critical view on the methods based on the quadratic functions and those based on the non quadratic ones will be proposed.

Biographical Information

Franco Blanchini was born on 29 December 1959, in Legnano (Italy). Since November 2000 he is Professor of Automatic Control at the Engineering Faculty of the University of Udine. He is Director of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science in Udine and he is Director of the Laboratory of System Dynamics of the Department. He has been Program Vice-Chairman for the conference Joint CDC-ECC, Seville, Spain, December 2005. He has been Program Vice-Chairman for Invited Sessions for the Conference CDC-2008, Cancun, Mexico, December 2008. He is the recipient of 2001 ASME Oil & Gas Application Committee Best Paper Award as a co-author of the article ``Experimental evaluation of a High--Gain Control for Compressor Surge Instability". He is the recipient of the 2002 IFAC prize survey paper award as author or the article "Set Invariance in Control--a survey", Automatica, November, 1999. He was nominated Senior Member IEEE in 2003. He has been Associate Editor for Automatica from 1996 to 2006. He is Associate Editor for IEEE Transctions on Automatic Control since 2011.