Correct-By-Construction Control Synthesis for Systems with Disturbance and Uncertainty

This dissertation focuses on correct-by-construction control synthesis for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) under model uncertainty and disturbance. CPSs are systems that interact with the physical world and perform complicated dynamic tasks where safety is often the overriding factor. Correct-by-construction control synthesis is a concept that provides formal performance guarantees to closed-loop systems by rigorous mathematic reasoning. Since CPSs interact with the environment, disturbance and modeling uncertainty are critical to the success of the control synthesis. Disturbance and uncertainty may come from a variety of sources, such as exogenous disturbance, the disturbance caused by co-existing controllers and modeling uncertainty. To better accommodate the different types of disturbance and uncertainty, the verification and control synthesis methods must be chosen accordingly. Four approaches are included in this dissertation. First, to deal with exogenous disturbance, a polar algorithm is developed to compute an avoidable set for obstacle avoidance. Second, a supervised learning based method is proposed to design a good student controller that has safety built-in and rarely triggers the intervention of the supervisory controller, thus targeting the design of the student controller. Third, to deal with the disturbance caused by co-existing controllers, a Lyapunov verification method is proposed to formally verify the safety of coexisting controllers while respecting the confidentiality requirement. Finally, a data-driven approach is proposed to deal with model uncertainty. A minimal robust control invariant set is computed for an uncertain dynamic system without a given model by first identifying the set of admissible models and then simultaneously computing the invariant set while selecting the optimal model. The proposed methods are applicable to many real-world applications and reflect the notion of using the structure of the system to achieve performance guarantees without being overly conservative.PHDMechanical EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/145933/1/chenyx_1.pd

System Level Synthesis with State and Input Constraints

This paper addresses the problem of designing distributed controllers with state and input constraints in the System Level Synthesis (SLS) framework. Using robust optimization, we show how state and actuation constraints can be incorporated into the SLS structure. Moreover, we show that the dual variable associated with the constraint has the same sparsity pattern as the SLS parametrization, and therefore the computation distributes using a simple primal-dual algorithm. We provide a stability analysis for SLS design with input saturation under the Internal Model Control (IMC) framework. We show that the closed-loop system with saturation is stable if the controller has a gain less than one. In addition, a saturation compensation scheme that incorporates the saturation information is proposed which improves the naive SLS design under saturation

System Level Synthesis with State and Input Constraints

This paper addresses the problem of designing distributed controllers with state and input constraints in the System Level Synthesis (SLS) framework. Using robust optimization, we show how state and actuation constraints can be incorporated into the SLS structure. Moreover, we show that the dual variable associated with the constraint has the same sparsity pattern as the SLS parametrization, and therefore the computation distributes using a simple primal-dual algorithm. We provide a stability analysis for SLS design with input saturation under the Internal Model Control (IMC) framework. We show that the closed-loop system with saturation is stable if the controller has a gain less than one. In addition, a saturation compensation scheme that incorporates the saturation information is proposed which improves the naive SLS design under saturation

Compositional Set Invariance in Network Systems with Assume-Guarantee Contracts

This paper presents an assume-guarantee reasoning approach to the computation of robust invariant sets for network systems. Parameterized signal temporal logic (pSTL) is used to formally describe the behaviors of the subsystems, which we use as the template for the contract. We show that set invariance can be proved with a valid assume-guarantee contract by reasoning about individual subsystems. If a valid assume-guarantee contract with monotonic pSTL template is known, it can be further refined by value iteration. When such a contract is not known, an epigraph method is proposed to solve for a contract that is valid, ---an approach that has linear complexity for a sparse network. A microgrid example is used to demonstrate the proposed method. The simulation result shows that together with control barrier functions, the states of all the subsystems can be bounded inside the individual robust invariant sets.Comment: Submitted to 2019 American Control Conferenc