Collaborative Research: Sequential Predictors for Partial Differential Equation and Delay Systems: Designs, Theory, and Applications

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This project solves the problem of implementability of feedback controls for a variety of dynamical systems that arise in additive manufacturing, battery modeling, deep mine elevators, oil drilling, traffic congestion, water desalination, and other engineering domains. Feedback control involves the use of information about the states of dynamical systems and about their surroundings, to decide how to adjust the behavior of the systems to realize important objectives such as ensuring that the systems safely converge to a desirable operating mode with minimal human intervention. The project combines the PIs' complementary expertise in engineering and mathematics, by tackling important interdisciplinary problems that could not be solved outside of this new collaborative framework. The project studies interconnected systems with delays, in which the current states of the systems or of their surroundings may not be available for use in the feedback control design, and related problems in extremum seeking under delays, in which one wishes to minimize important types of cost criteria. Through the PIs' contacts with engineers from industry, the project will increase the engineering community's use of more rigorous methods to obtain better performing controls and will also provide interdisciplinary training to graduate students that is guided by compelling engineering applications.The project provides transformative control and extremum seeking algorithms for key classes of ODE and ODE-PDE cascades that involve delays, prescribed regulation times, and uncertainties. Input delays arise from sensor or transport phenomena, and finite time constraints occur when there are hard deadlines for achieving control objectives. While prediction has been used extensively, there are currently no analogs of prediction for stabilization problems with prescribed regulation times where there are delays and uncertain model parameters. This project overcomes these challenges for general classes of nonlinear systems, using new sequential predictors, sequential anti-diffusors, chain observers, adaptive control with parameter identification, and extremum seeking under delays or time constraints, including cases where only sampled output measurements are available. The controls developed ensure better disturbance rejection and robustness against uncertainties. The project is guided by cutting edge engineering applications, to ensure the usefulness of the theory. They involve models for underwater marine robots where slow acoustic communication is modeled through long delays, the reduction of severe slugging in oil production, and online social networks where opinion spreading is modeled by PDE-ODE cascades with diffusion. The project will include experimental real time implementation of some of the controls and train PhD students.