Validation and Verification of Aircraft Control Software for Control Improvement

Validation and Verification are important processes used to ensure software safety and reliability. The Cooper-Harper Aircraft Handling Qualities Rating is one of the techniques developed and used by NASA researchers to verify and validate control systems for aircrafts. Using the Validation and Verification result of controller software to improve controller\u27s performance will be one of the main objectives of this process. Real user feedback will be used to tune PI controller in order for it to perform better. The Cooper-Harper Aircraft Handling Qualities Rating can be used to justify the performance of the improved system

Fault-tolerant observer design with a tolerance measure for systems with sensor failure

A fault-tolerant switching observer design methodology is proposed. The aim is to maintain a desired level of closed-loop performance under a range of sensor fault scenarios while the fault-free nominal performance is optimized. The range of considered fault scenarios is determined by a minimum number p of assumed working sensors. Thus the smaller p is, the more fault tolerant is the observer. This is then used to define a fault tolerance measure for observer design. Due to the combinatorial nature of the problem, a semidefinite relaxation procedure is proposed to deal with the large number of fault scenarios for systems that have many vulnerable sensors. The procedure results in a significant reduction in the number of constraints needed to solve the problem. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the effectiveness of the fault-tolerant observer design

Robust control examples applied to a wind turbine simulated model

Wind turbine plants are complex dynamic and uncertain processes driven by stochastic inputs and disturbances, as well as different loads represented by gyroscopic, centrifugal and gravitational forces. Moreover, as their aerodynamic models are nonlinear, both modeling and control become challenging problems. On the one hand, high-fidelity simulators should contain different parameters and variables in order to accurately describe the main dynamic system behavior. Therefore, the development of modeling and control for wind turbine systems should consider these complexity aspects. On the other hand, these control solutions have to include the main wind turbine dynamic characteristics without becoming too complicated. The main point of this paper is thus to provide two practical examples of the development of robust control strategies when applied to a simulated wind turbine plant. Extended simulations with the wind turbine benchmark model and the Monte Carlo tool represent the instruments for assessing the robustness and reliability aspects of the developed control methodologies when the model-reality mismatch and measurement errors are also considered. Advantages and drawbacks of these regulation methods are also highlighted with respect to different control strategies via proper performance metrics.Wind turbine plants are complex dynamic and uncertain processes driven by stochastic inputs and disturbances, as well as different loads represented by gyroscopic, centrifugal and gravitational forces. Moreover, as their aerodynamic models are nonlinear, both modeling and control become challenging problems. On the one hand, high-fidelity simulators should contain different parameters and variables in order to accurately describe the main dynamic system behavior. Therefore, the development of modeling and control for wind turbine systems should consider these complexity aspects. On the other hand, these control solutions have to include the main wind turbine dynamic characteristics without becoming too complicated. The main point of this paper is thus to provide two practical examples of the development of robust control strategies when applied to a simulated wind turbine plant. Extended simulations with the wind turbine benchmark model and the Monte Carlo tool represent the instruments for assessing the robustness and reliability aspects of the developed control methodologies when the model-reality mismatch and measurement errors are also considered. Advantages and drawbacks of these regulation methods are also highlighted with respect to different control strategies via proper performance metrics

Q-LEARNING, POLICY ITERATION AND ACTOR-CRITIC REINFORCEMENT LEARNING COMBINED WITH METAHEURISTIC ALGORITHMS IN SERVO SYSTEM CONTROL

This paper carries out the performance analysis of three control system structures and approaches, which combine Reinforcement Learning (RL) and Metaheuristic Algorithms (MAs) as representative optimization algorithms. In the first approach, the Gravitational Search Algorithm (GSA) is employed to initialize the parameters (weights and biases) of the Neural Networks (NNs) involved in Deep Q-Learning by replacing the traditional way of initializing the NNs based on random generated values. In the second approach, the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO) algorithm is employed to train the policy NN in Policy Iteration RL-based control. In the third approach, the GWO algorithm is employed as a critic in an Actor-Critic framework, and used to evaluate the performance of the actor NN. The goal of this paper is to analyze all three RL-based control approaches, aiming to determine which one represents the best fit for solving the proposed control optimization problem. The performance analysis is based on non-parametric statistical tests conducted on the data obtained from real-time experimental results specific to nonlinear servo system position control