Romanian Attitudes and Perceptions towards the 16+1 Cooperation Platform

The aim of this paper is to analyze Romanian citizens’ attitudes and perceptions towards the 16+1 framework, their determinants and effects. The influencing factors are correlated with the general perception of China and its image, while the effects are seen from the perspectives of the engagement and level of participation in joint initiatives. Recent literature underscores that although this platform offers a range of opportunities in each of the nine pillars of sectoral cooperation, Romania has adopted a passive attitude as regards large-scale projects developed with Chinese partners. Beyond EU specific technical barriers to such projects, the Romanian attitudes towards the 16+1 strongly affected cooperation intensity with China. Positions towards this initiative (opinions from general public, elites, politicians and experts) are identified through three main channels: mass media research, individual interviews and focus groups. The quantitative analysis, combined with qualitative research, emphasizes that in spite of the recognition by some groups of the potential benefits offered by the cooperation in the 16+1 format, reluctance remains. This is not due to China’s assets-liabilities balance or the lack of capacity to understand China, but on both insufficient information on 16+1 and political inertia

Robust model predictive control for a class of disturbed systems

This paper proposes a robust model predictive control method for a class of linear discrete time, uncertain and disturbed systems. A relationship between the system disturbance, the states and control input exists, which is used to remove, through several manipulations, the disturbance from the control optimization problem. Moreover, in comparison with other several previous studies, the disturbance does not act directly on the system, a system disturbance matrix being introduced. In principle, the main objective is to find a control law by solving a min-max problem in which a robust performance objective is to be minimized. Instead, an equivalent optimization problem is solved and an upper bound is found for the robust performance objective using a Lyapunov function. With the upper bound, the equivalent control optimization problem is formulated. The solutions of the equivalent optimization problem are used to construct the control law. A Matlab simulation, using Yalmip toolbox, indicates that the states are stabilized to zero and the control input tends to zero