Fixed-order H-infinity controller design for systems with ellipsoidal parametric uncertainty

In this paper, fixed-order robust H-infinity controller design for systems with ellipsoidal parametric uncertainty based on parameter dependent Lyapunov functions is studied. Using the concept of Strictly Positive Realness (SPRness) of transfer functions, a fixed-order robust control design method in terms of solution to a set of Linear Matrix Inequalities (LMIs) is proposed. Since, controller parameters are decision variables, any controller structure, such as PID, can be considered. The weighted infinity-norm of closed loop sensitivity functions are considered as performance specification in the synthesis problem. The simulation results show the effectiveness of the proposed method

Fixed-structure H-2 controller design for polytopic systems via LMIs

In this paper a new approach for fixed-structure H2 controller design in terms of solutions to a set of linear matrix inequalities are given. Both discrete- and continuous-time single-input single-output (SISO) time- invariant systems are considered. Then the results are extended to systems with polytopic uncertainty. The presented methods are based on an inner convex approximation of the non-convex set of fixed-structure H2 controllers. The designed procedures initialized either with a stable polynomial or with a stabilizing controller. An iterative procedure for robust controller design is given that converges to a suboptimal solution. The monotonic decreasing of the upper bound on the H2 norm is established theoretically for both nominal and robust controller design

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This paper presents the synthesis of an optimal robust controller with the use of pole placement technique. The presented method includes solving a polynomial equation on the basis of the chosen fixed characteristic polynomial and introduced parametric solutions with a known parametric structure of the controller. Robustness criteria in an unstructured uncertainty description with metrics of norm ℋ∞ are for a more reliable and effective formulation of objective functions for optimization presented in the form of a spectral polynomial with positivity conditions. The method enables robust low-order controller design by using plant simplification with partial-fraction decomposition, where the simplification remainder is added to the performance weight. The controller structure is assembled of well-known parts such as disturbance rejection, and reference tracking. The approach also allows the possibility of multiobjective optimization of robust criteria, application of mixed sensitivity problem, and other closed-loop limitation criteria, where the common criteria function can be composed from different unrelated criteria. Optimization and controller design are performed with iterative evolution algorithm

Fixed-Order H-infinity Controller Design via Convex Optimization Using an Alternative to Youla Prameterization

All H-infinity controllers of a SISO LTI system are parameterized thanks to the relation between Bounded Real Lemma and Positive Real Lemma and a new concept of strict positive realness of two transfer functions with the same Lyapunov matrix in the matrix inequality of the Kalman-Yakubovic-Popov lemma. This new parameterization shares the same features with Youla parameterization, namely on the convexity of H-infinity norm constraints for the closed-loop transfer functions. However, in contrary to Youla parameterization, it can deal with any controller order and any controller structure such as e.g. PID. The main feature of the proposed method is that it can be extended easily for the systems with polytopic uncertainty. This way, a convex inner approximation of all H-infinity controllers for polytopic systems is given, which can be enlarged by increasing the controller order. In order to design a low-order robust H-infinity controller with less conservatism, rank of the k-th Sylvester resultant matrix of the controller is made to be deficient via a convex approximation of the rank minimization problem. The effectiveness of the proposed method is shown via simulation results

Model Order Reduction Based on Semidefinite Programming

The main topic of this PhD thesis is complexity reduction of linear time-invariant models. The complexity in such systems is measured by the number of differential equations forming the dynamical system. This number is called the order of the system. Order reduction is typically used as a tool to model complex systems, the simulation of which takes considerable time and/or has overwhelming memory requirements. Any model reflects an approximation of a real world system. Therefore, it is reasonable to sacrifice some model accuracy in order to obtain a simpler representation. Once a low-order model is obtained, the simulation becomes computationally cheaper, which saves time and resources. A low-order model still has to be "similar" to the full order one in some sense. There are many ways of measuring "similarity" and, typically, such a measure is chosen depending on the application. Three different settings of model order reduction were investigated in the thesis. The first one is H infinity model order reduction, i.e., the distance between two models is measured by the H infinity norm. Although, the problem has been tackled by many researchers, all the optimal solutions are yet to be found. However, there are a large number of methods, which solve suboptimal problems and deliver accurate approximations. Recently, research community has devoted more attention to large-scale systems and computationally scalable extensions of existing model reduction techniques. The algorithm developed in the thesis is based on the frequency response samples matching. For a large class of systems the computation of the frequency response samples can be done very efficiently. Therefore, the developed algorithm is relatively computationally cheap. The proposed algorithm can be seen as a computationally scalable extension to the well-known Hankel model reduction, which is known to deliver very accurate solutions. One of the reasons for such an assessment is that the relaxation employed in the proposed algorithm is tightly related to the one used in Hankel model reduction. Numerical simulations also show that the accuracy of the method is comparable to the Hankel model reduction one. The second part of the thesis is devoted to parameterized model order reduction. A parameterized model is essentially a family of models which depend on certain design parameters. The model reduction goal in this setting is to approximate the whole family of models for all values of parameters. The main motivation for such a model reduction setting is design of a model with an appropriate set of parameters. In order to make a good choice of parameters, the models need to be simulated for a large set of parameters. After inspecting the simulation results a model can be picked with suitable frequency or step responses. Parameterized model reduction significantly simplifies this procedure. The proposed algorithm for parameterized model reduction is a straightforward extension of the one described above. The proposed algorithm is applicable to linear parameter-varying systems modeling as well. Finally, the third topic is modeling interconnections of systems. In this thesis an interconnection is a collection of systems (or subsystems) connected in a typical block-diagram. In order to avoid confusion, throughout the thesis the entire model is called a supersystem, as opposed to subsystems, which a supersystem consists of. One of the specific cases of structured model reduction is controller reduction. In this problem there are two subsystems: the plant and the controller. Two directions of model reduction of interconnected systems are considered: model reduction in the nu-gap metric and structured model reduction. To some extent, using the nu-gap metric makes it possible to model subsystems without considering the supersystem at all. This property can be exploited for extremely large supersystems for which some forms of analysis (evaluating stability, computing step response, etc.) are intractable. However, a more systematic way of modeling is structured model reduction. There, the objective is to approximate certain subsystems in such a way that crucial characteristics of the given supersystem, such as stability, structure of interconnections, frequency response, are preserved. In structured model reduction all subsystems are taken into account, not only the approximated ones. In order to address structured model reduction, the supersystem is represented in a coprime factor form, where its structure also appears in coprime factors. Using this representation the problem is reduced to H infinity model reduction, which is addressed by the presented framework. All the presented methods are validated on academic or known benchmark problems. Since all the methods are based on semidefinite programming, adding new constraints is a matter of formulating a constraint as a semidefinite one. A number of extensions are presented, which illustrate the power of the approach. Properties of the methods are discussed throughout the thesis while some remaining problems conclude the manuscript

Fixed-structure Control of LTI Systems with Polytopic-type Uncertainty:Application to Inverter-interfaced Microgrids

This thesis focuses on the development of robust control solutions for linear time-invariant interconnected systems affected by polytopic-type uncertainty. The main issues involved in the control of such systems, e.g. sensor and actuator placement, control configuration selection, and robust fixed-structure control design are included. The problem of fixed-structure control is intrinsically nonconvex and hence computationally intractable. Nevertheless, the problem has attracted considerable attention due to the great importance of fixed-structure controllers in practice. In this thesis, necessary and sufficient conditions for fixed-structure H_inf control of polytopic systems with a single uncertain parameter in terms of a finite number of bilinear matrix inequalities (BMIs) are developed. Increasing the number of uncertain parameters leads to sufficient BMI conditions, where the number of decision variables grows polynomially. Convex approximations of robust fixed-order and fixed-structure controller design which rely on the concept of strictly positive realness (SPRness) of transfer functions in state space setting are presented. Such approximations are based on the use of slack matrices whose duty is to decouple the product of unknown matrices. Several algorithms for determination and update of the slack matrices are given. It is shown that the problem of sensor and actuator placement in the polytopic interconnected systems can be formulated as an optimization problem by minimizing cardinality of some pattern matrices, while satisfying a guaranteed level of H_inf performance. The control configuration design is achieved by solving a convex optimization problem whose solution delivers a trade-off curve that starts with a centralized controller and ends with a decentralized or a distributed controller. The proposed approaches are applied to inverter-interfaced microgrids which consist of distributed generation (DG) units. To this end, two important control problems associated with the microgrids are considered: (i) Current control of grid-connected voltage-source converters with L/LCL filters and (ii) Voltage control of islanded microgrids. The proposed control strategies are able to independently regulate the direct and quadrature (dq) components of the converter currents and voltages at the point of common couplings (PCC) in a fully decoupled manner and provide satisfactory dynamic responses. The important problem of plug-and-play (PnP) capability of DGs in the microgrids is also studied. It is shown that an inverter-interfaced microgrid consisting of multi DGs under PnP functionality can be cast as a system with polytopic-type uncertainty. By virtue of this novel description and use of the results from theory of robust control, the stability of the microgrid system under PnP operation of DGs is preserved. Extensive case studies, based on time-domain simulations in MATLAB/SimPowerSystems Toolbox, are carried out to evaluate the performance of the proposed controllers under various test scenarios, e.g., load change, voltage and current tracking. Real-time hardware-in-the-loop case studies, using RT-LAB real-time platform of OPAL-RT Technologies, are also conducted to validate the performance of the designed controllers and demonstrate their insensitivity to hardware implementation issues, e.g., noise and PWM non-idealities. The simulation and experimental results demonstrate satisfactory performance of the designed controllers