Emergent Problems In Nonlinear Systems And Control

Papers in this collection partly represent the set of talks that were presented at Texas Tech University on the occasion of Daya’s memorial workshop in the year 2007. Daya had a varied interest in the field of Dynamics and Control Theory and the papers bring out the essence of his involvement in these activities. He also had a large number of collaborators and this collection represent a good fraction of them. The papers included here cover his interest in control theory. Also included are papers from application areas that we believe are of strong interest to him.

Papers in this collection partly represent the set of talks that were presented at Texas Tech University on the occasion of Daya’s memorial workshop in the year 2007. Daya had a varied interest in the field of Dynamics and Control Theory and the papers bring out the essence of his involvement in these activities. He also had a large number of collaborators and this collection represent a good fraction of them. The papers included here cover his interest in control theory. Also included are papers from application areas that we believe are of strong interest to him.

Block-oriented Nonlinear System Identification deals with an area of research that has been very active since the turn of the millennium. The book makes a pedagogical and cohesive presentation of the methods developed in that time. These include: iterative and over-parameterization techniques; stochastic and frequency approaches; support-vector-machine, subspace, and separable-least-squares methods; blind identification method; bounded-error method; and decoupling inputs approach. The identification methods are presented by authors who have either invented them or contributed significantly to their development. All the important issues e.g., input design, persistent excitation, and consistency analysis, are discussed. The practical relevance of block-oriented models is illustrated through biomedical/physiological system modelling. The book will be of major interest to all those who are concerned with nonlinear system identification whatever their activity areas. This is particularly the case for educators in electrical, mechanical, chemical and biomedical engineering and for practising engineers in process, aeronautic, aerospace, robotics and vehicles control. Block-oriented Nonlinear System Identification serves as a reference for active researchers, new comers, industrial and education practitioners and graduate students alike.

This book comprises a selection of the presentations made at the “Workshop on Dynamics and Control of Micro and Nanoscale Systems” held at IBM Research – Zurich, Switzerland, on the 10th and 11th of December 2009. The aim of the workshop was to bring together some of the leading researchers in the field of dynamics and control of micro- and nanoscale systems. It proved an excellent forum for discussing new ideas and approaches.

This monograph covers some selected problems of positive fractional 1D and 2D linear systems. It is an extended and modified English version of its preceding Polish edition published by Technical University of Bialystok in 2009. This book is based on the lectures delivered by the author to the Ph.D. students of the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of Bialystok University of Technology and of Warsaw University of Technology and on invited lectures in several foreign universities in the last three years.

This research monograph summarizes solutions to reconfigurable fault-tolerant control problems for nonlinear dynamical systems that are based on the fault-hiding principle. It emphasizes but is not limited to complete actuator and sensor failures. In the first part, the monograph starts with a broad introduction of the control reconfiguration problems and objectives as well as summaries and explanations of solutions for linear dynamical systems. The solution is always a reconfiguration block, which consists of linear virtual actuators in the case of actuator faults and linear virtual sensors in the case of sensor faults. The main advantage of the fault-hiding concept is the reusability of the nominal controller, which remains in the loop as an active system while the virtual actuator and sensor adapt the control input and the measured output to the fault scenario. The second and third parts extend virtual actuators and virtual sensors towards the classes of Hammerstein-Wiener systems and piecewise affine systems. The main analyses concern stability recovery, setpoint tracking recovery, and performance recovery as reconfiguration objectives. The fourth part concludes the monograph with descriptions of practical implementations and case studies. The book is primarily intended for active researchers and practicing engineers in the field of fault-tolerant control. Due to many running examples it is also suitable for interested graduate students.

Linear, Time-varying Approximations to Nonlinear Dynamical Systems introduces a new technique for analysing and controlling nonlinear systems. This method is general and requires only very mild conditions on the system nonlinearities, setting it apart from other techniques such as those – well-known – based on differential geometry. The authors cover many aspects of nonlinear systems including stability theory, control design and extensions to distributed parameter systems. Many of the classical and modern control design methods which can be applied to linear, time-varying systems can be extended to nonlinear systems by this technique. The implementation of the control is therefore simple and can be done with well-established classical methods. Many aspects of nonlinear systems, such as spectral theory which is important for the generalisation of frequency domain methods, can be approached by this method.

Saturation nonlinearities are ubiquitous in engineering systems: every physical actuator or sensor is subject to saturation owing to its maximum and minimum limits. Input saturation is an operating condition that is well known to the control community for its “side effects”, which cause conventional controllers to lose their closed-loop performance as well as control authority in stabilization. Therefore, the practical application of control theory cannot avoid taking into account saturation nonlinearities in actuators, explicitly dealing with constraints in control design.