Systematischer Entwurf hierarchisch-hybrider Regelsysteme

在化学工业中，不连续操作的装置被广泛用于生产精细或特种化学品。一个典型的任务是在保证安全和一定的质量下限的同时实现利润最大化。为了达到这一规范，必须适当地处理控制输入信号。从理论上看，这是一个非常不平凡的控制问题，因为一些输入是实数或连续值信号，而其他输入只能取有限数量的离散值。在实践中，以配方为基础的方法占了上风。它们意味着确定一个固定的配方，该配方为每个所需产品提供关于明确定义的任务的顺序和持续时间的信息。在通常称为“调度”的后续步骤中，必须将这些任务分配给可用资源。这种方法有两个重要的缺点：解决方案显然远远不是最优的；此外，由于这种方法是开环的，它只有在没有不可预见的干扰的情况下才能起作用。拟议项目的主题是研究这种类型工厂的替代控制策略。特别是，通过将基于优化的方法与来自混合系统理论的基于抽象的方法相结合，我们期望能够计算出显著提高性能的闭环系统控制策略，同时控制复杂性。

In the chemical industries discontinuously operated plants are widely used for the production of fine or specialty chemicals. A typical task is to maximize profit while guaranteeing safety and certain lower bounds for quality. To achieve this specification the control input signals have to be suitably manipulated. From a theoretical point of view this is a highly nontrivial control problem as some of the inputs are real- or continuous-valued signals, while others can only take a finite number of discrete values. In practice recipe-based approaches prevail. They imply determining a fixed recipe, which provides information about the sequence and duration of well-defined tasks for every desired product. In a subsequent step commonly called "scheduling" these tasks have to be assigned to available resources. This approach has two important shortcomings: solutions are clearly far from optimal; moreover, as the approach is open-loop, it will only work in the absence of unforseen disturbances. The topic of the proposed project is to investigate alternative control strategies for this type of plant. In particular, by combining an optimization based approach with an abstraction based method from hybrid systems theory we expect to be able to compute closed-loop control strategies that significantly improve performance while keeping a lid on complexity.