Structural Controllability of Switched Continuous and Discrete Time Linear Systems

This paper explores the structural controllability of switched continuous and discrete time linear systems. It identifies a gap in the proof for a pivotal criterion for structural controllability of switched continuous time systems in the literature. To address this void, we develop novel graph-theoretic concepts, such as multi-layer dynamic graphs, generalized stems/buds, and generalized cactus configurations, and based on them, provide a comprehensive proof for this criterion. Our approach also induces a new, generalized cactus based graph-theoretic criterion for structural controllability. This not only extends Lin's cactus-based graph-theoretic condition to switched systems for the first time, but also provides a lower bound for the generic dimension of controllable subspaces (which is conjectured to be exact). Finally, we present extensions to reversible switched discrete-time systems, which lead to not only a simplified necessary and sufficient condition for structural controllability, but also the determination of the generic dimension of controllable subspaces.Comment: Submitted to a journa

Green Scheduling of Control Systems

Electricity usage under peak load conditions can cause issues such as reduced power quality and power outages. For this reason, commercial electricity customers are often subject to demand-based pricing, which charges very high prices for peak electricity demand. Consequently, reducing peaks in electricity demand is desirable for both economic and reliability reasons. In this thesis, we investigate the peak demand reduction problem from the perspective of safe scheduling of control systems under resource constraint. To this end, we propose Green Scheduling as an approach to schedule multiple interacting control systems within a constrained peak demand envelope while ensuring that safety and operational conditions are facilitated. The peak demand envelope is formulated as a constraint on the number of binary control inputs that can be activated simultaneously. Using two different approaches, we establish a range of sufficient and necessary schedulability conditions for various classes of affine dynamical systems. The schedulability analysis methods are shown to be scalable for large-scale systems consisting of up to 1000 subsystems. We then develop several scheduling algorithms for the Green Scheduling problem. First, we develop a periodic scheduling synthesis method, which is simple and scalable in computation but does not take into account the influence of disturbances. We then improve the method to be robust to small disturbances while preserving the simplicity and scalability of periodic scheduling. However the improved algorithm usually result in fast switching of the control inputs. Therefore, event-triggered and self-triggered techniques are used to alleviate this issue. Next, using a feedback control approach based on attracting sets and robust control Lyapunov functions, we develop event-triggered and self-triggered scheduling algorithms that can handle large disturbances affecting the system. These algorithms can also exploit prediction of the disturbances to improve their performance. Finally, a scheduling method for discrete-time systems is developed based on backward reachability analysis. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated by an application to scheduling of radiant heating and cooling systems in buildings. Green Scheduling is able to significantly reduce the peak electricity demand and the total electricity consumption of the radiant systems, while maintaining thermal comfort for occupants

Reachability of Consensus and Synchronizing Automata

We consider the problem of determining the existence of a sequence of matrices driving a discrete-time consensus system to consensus. We transform this problem into one of the existence of a product of the transition (stochastic) matrices that has a positive column. We then generalize some results from automata theory to sets of stochastic matrices. We obtain as a main result a polynomial-time algorithm to decide the existence of a sequence of matrices achieving consensus.Comment: Update after revie

Estimation and control of non-linear and hybrid systems with applications to air-to-air guidance

Issued as Progress report, and Final report, Project no. E-21-67

Filter Design for Positive T-S Fuzzy Continuous-Time Systems with Time Delay Using Piecewise-Linear Membership Functions

The file attached to this record is the author's final peer reviewed version. The Publisher's final version can be found by following the DOI link.This work focuses on the filtering problem and stability analysis for positive Takagi-Sugeno (T-S) fuzzy systems with time delay under L1-induced performance. Due to the importance of estimation of system states but the few filter design results on positive nonlinear systems, it is an attractive and meaningful topic well worth studying. In order to fully exploit and take advantage of the positivity of positive T-S fuzzy systems, many commonly used methods, for instance free-weighting matrix approach and similarity transformation are probably not suitable for positive systems. To address the hard-nut-to-crack problem, an auxiliary variable is introduced so that the augmentation approach can be employed to carry out the positivity and stability analysis of filtering error systems. In addition, another obstacle that cannot be ignored is the existence of non-convex terms in the stability and positivity conditions. For getting around this barrier, some iterative linear matrix inequality (ILMI) algorithms have been proposed in the literature. However, considering the weakness that these methods cannot guarantee the convergence to a numerical solution and the iterative process is exhaustive, we present an effective matrix decoupling method to convert the nonconvex conditions into convex ones in this paper. Furthermore, a linear co-positive Lyapunov function which incorporates the positivity of system states and time delay at the same time is chosen so that the positivity characteristic of filtering error systems can be captured further. However, because of plenty of valuable information of membership functions (MFs) being ignored, hence, the obtained results are conservative. For the sake of relaxing the conservativeness, the advanced piecewise-linear membership functions (PLMFs) approximate method is utilized to facilitate the stability and positivity analysis. Therefore, the relaxed stability and positivity conditions which are cast as sum of squares (SOS) are obtained and can be solved numerically. Finally, the effectiveness of the designed fuzzy filtering strategy with satisfying L1-induced performance are demonstrated by a simulation example