A Collaborative Research on Multivariable Fixed Order Controller Synthesis and Design from Data

该奖项由2009年美国复苏和再投资法案(公法111-5)资助。这项研究旨在开发新的基本理论和有效的设计方法，以解决现有控制理论无法有效处理的实际重要问题：具体地说，该提案将开发满足多种设计规范的多变量系统固定和低阶控制器的设计方法，这些方法基于测量数据而不是基于模型。这是一个非常现实的工程问题，尽管计算机辅助设计取得了重大进展，但它仍然是一个悬而未决的问题。反馈控制系统设计的目标是精确地调节动态系统中的物理量，如位置、速度、温度、压力、流量和液位，尽管存在重大的不确定性和对潜在过程的行为的了解。本提案处理控制设计问题，以期克服几个悬而未决的挑战。这些是a)需要开发直接使用测量数据的设计方法，因为数学模型对于大多数系统是不可用的；b)低阶或低复杂性控制器的设计，因为现有方法产生的高阶控制器通常是脆弱的或非常敏感的，因此无法实现；以及c)满足多个用户定义的规范的设计。关于积分和一阶控制器的初步结果看起来很有希望。这项研究应该会对从化学流程、制造系统、磁盘驱动器、导弹和飞机控制、互联网拥塞控制以及包括遗传网络在内的生物控制系统的控制应用产生重大影响。在这些应用中，几乎没有可用的模型，也没有有效的设计技术来有效地设计简单的控制器。

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).This research aims to develop new fundamental theory and effective design methodologies to address practically important issues that existing control theories cannot effectively handle: specifically the proposal will develop methods for the design of fixed and low order controllers for multivariable systems which satisfy multiple design specifications and which are based on the measured data and not on models. This is a very realistic engineering problem that remains open despite significant progress in computer-aided design. The objective of feedback control system design is to precisely regulate physical quantities such as position, velocity, temperature, pressure, flow-rate and level in dynamic systems despite significant uncertainty and knowledge of the behavior of the underlying processes. The present proposal approaches the control design problem with a view to overcoming several outstanding challenges. These are a) the need to develop design methods which use measured data directly since mathematical models are unavailable for most systems b) the design of low order or low complexity controllers since the existing methods yield high order controllers which are often fragile or acutely sensitive and therefore unimplementable and c) designs which satisfy multiple user defined specifications. Preliminary results on integral and first order controllers look promising. The research should have a significant impact on control applications ranging from chemical processes, manufacturing systems, disk drives, missile and aircraft control, internet congestion control and biological control systems including genetic networks. In each of these applications models are scarcely available and few effective design techniques exist for the effective design of simple controllers.