Taming Heterogeneity And Complexity Of Embedded Control

This book gathers together a selection of papers presented at the Joint CTS-HYCON Workshop on Nonlinear and Hybrid Control held at the Paris Sorbonne, France, 10-12 July 2006. The main objective of the Workshop was to promote the exchange of ideas and experiences and reinforce scientific contacts in the large multidisciplinary area of the control of nonlinear and hybrid systems.

The emergence of a true systemic science - the systemic one - capable of rigorously addressing the many problems posed by the design and management of the evolution of modern complex systems is therefore urgently needed if wants to be able to provide satisfactory answers to the many profoundly systemic challenges that humanity will have to face at the dawn of the third millennium. This emergence is of course not easy because one can easily understand that the development of the systemic is mechanically confronted with all the classical disciplines which can all pretend to bring part of the explanations necessary to the understanding of a system and which do not naturally see a good eye a new discipline claim to encompass them in a holistic approach ... The book of Jacques Printz is therefore an extremely important contribution to this new emerging scientific and technical discipline: it is indeed first of all one of the very few "serious" works published in French and offering a good introduction to the systemic. It gives an extremely broad vision of this field, taking a thread given by the architecture of systems, in other words by the part of the systemic that is interested in the structure of systems and their design processes, which allows everyone to fully understand the issues and issues of the systemic. We can only encourage the reader to draw all the quintessence of the masterful work of Jacques Printz which mixes historical reminders explaining how the systemic emerged, introduction to key concepts of the systemic and practical examples to understand the nature and the scope of the ideas introduced.

Although complexity makes up the very fabric of our daily lives and has been more or less addressed in a wide variety of knowledge fields, the approaches developed in the Natural Sciences and the results obtained over the past century have not yet permeated Management Sciences very much. The main features of the phenomena that the Natural Sciences deal with are: non-linear behavior, self-organization and chaos. They are analyzed with the framing of what is called “systems thinking”, popularized by the mindset pertaining to cybernetics. All pioneers in systems thinking either had direct or indirect connections with Biology, which is the discipline considered complex par excellence by the public. When applying these concepts to Operations Management Systems and modeling organizations by BDI (Beliefs, Desires, Intentions) agents, the lack of predictability in the conduct of change management that is prone to bifurcations (tipping points) in terms of organizational structures and in forecasting future activities, reveals them to be ingrained in the interplay of complexity and chaos.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control, HSCC 2007, held in Pisa, Italy in April 2007. Among the topics addressed are models of heterogeneous systems, computability and complexity issues, real-time computing and control, embedded and resource-aware control, control and estimation over wireless networks, and programming languages support and implementation.

This book presents the most important methods used for the design of digital controls implemented in industrial applications. The best modelling and identification techniques for dynamical systems are presented as well as the algorithms for the implementation of the modern solutions of process control. The proposed described methods are illustrated by various case studies for the main industrial sectors There exist a number of books related each one to a single type of control, yet usually without comparisons for various industrial sectors. Some other books present modelling and identification methods or signal processing. This book presents the methods to solve all the problems linked to the design of a process control without the need to find additional information.

This book covers various modern theoretical, technical, practical and technological aspects of computerized numerical control and control systems of deterministic and stochastic dynamical processes.

In the automotive industry, a Control Engineer must design a unique control law that is then tested and validated on a single prototype with a level of reliability high enough to to meet a number of complex specifications on various systems. In order to do this, the Engineer uses an experimental iterative process (Trial and Error phase) which relies heavily on his or her experience. This book looks to optimise the methods for synthesising servo controllers ny making them more direct and thus quicker to design. This is achieved by calculating a final controller to directly tackle the high-end system specs.