Synthesis of Minimal Error Control Software

Software implementations of controllers for physical systems are at the core of many embedded systems. The design of controllers uses the theory of dynamical systems to construct a mathematical control law that ensures that the controlled system has certain properties, such as asymptotic convergence to an equilibrium point, while optimizing some performance criteria. However, owing to quantization errors arising from the use of fixed-point arithmetic, the implementation of this control law can only guarantee practical stability: under the actions of the implementation, the trajectories of the controlled system converge to a bounded set around the equilibrium point, and the size of the bounded set is proportional to the error in the implementation. The problem of verifying whether a controller implementation achieves practical stability for a given bounded set has been studied before. In this paper, we change the emphasis from verification to automatic synthesis. Using synthesis, the need for formal verification can be considerably reduced thereby reducing the design time as well as design cost of embedded control software. We give a methodology and a tool to synthesize embedded control software that is Pareto optimal w.r.t. both performance criteria and practical stability regions. Our technique is a combination of static analysis to estimate quantization errors for specific controller implementations and stochastic local search over the space of possible controllers using particle swarm optimization. The effectiveness of our technique is illustrated using examples of various standard control systems: in most examples, we achieve controllers with close LQR-LQG performance but with implementation errors, hence regions of practical stability, several times as small.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Parameters identification of unknown delayed genetic regulatory networks by a switching particle swarm optimization algorithm

The official published version can be found at the link below.This paper presents a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm based on Markov chains and competitive penalized method. Such an algorithm is developed to solve global optimization problems with applications in identifying unknown parameters of a class of genetic regulatory networks (GRNs). By using an evolutionary factor, a new switching PSO (SPSO) algorithm is first proposed and analyzed, where the velocity updating equation jumps from one mode to another according to a Markov chain, and acceleration coefficients are dependent on mode switching. Furthermore, a leader competitive penalized multi-learning approach (LCPMLA) is introduced to improve the global search ability and refine the convergent solutions. The LCPMLA can automatically choose search strategy using a learning and penalizing mechanism. The presented SPSO algorithm is compared with some well-known PSO algorithms in the experiments. It is shown that the SPSO algorithm has faster local convergence speed, higher accuracy and algorithm reliability, resulting in better balance between the global and local searching of the algorithm, and thus generating good performance. Finally, we utilize the presented SPSO algorithm to identify not only the unknown parameters but also the coupling topology and time-delay of a class of GRNs.This research was partially supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of PR China (Grant No. 60874113), the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education (Grant No. 200802550007), the Key Creative Project of Shanghai Education Community (Grant No. 09ZZ66), the Key Foundation Project of Shanghai (Grant No. 09JC1400700), the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council EPSRC of the UK under Grant No. GR/S27658/01, the International Science and Technology Cooperation Project of China under Grant No. 2009DFA32050, an International Joint Project sponsored by the Royal Society of the UK, and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany

State-of-the-art in aerodynamic shape optimisation methods

Aerodynamic optimisation has become an indispensable component for any aerodynamic design over the past 60 years, with applications to aircraft, cars, trains, bridges, wind turbines, internal pipe flows, and cavities, among others, and is thus relevant in many facets of technology. With advancements in computational power, automated design optimisation procedures have become more competent, however, there is an ambiguity and bias throughout the literature with regards to relative performance of optimisation architectures and employed algorithms. This paper provides a well-balanced critical review of the dominant optimisation approaches that have been integrated with aerodynamic theory for the purpose of shape optimisation. A total of 229 papers, published in more than 120 journals and conference proceedings, have been classified into 6 different optimisation algorithm approaches. The material cited includes some of the most well-established authors and publications in the field of aerodynamic optimisation. This paper aims to eliminate bias toward certain algorithms by analysing the limitations, drawbacks, and the benefits of the most utilised optimisation approaches. This review provides comprehensive but straightforward insight for non-specialists and reference detailing the current state for specialist practitioners

Particle swarm optimization with sequential niche technique for dynamic finite element model updating

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