79 research outputs found
Approximately bisimilar symbolic models for nonlinear control systems
Control systems are usually modeled by differential equations describing how
physical phenomena can be influenced by certain control parameters or inputs.
Although these models are very powerful when dealing with physical phenomena,
they are less suitable to describe software and hardware interfacing the
physical world. For this reason there is a growing interest in describing
control systems through symbolic models that are abstract descriptions of the
continuous dynamics, where each "symbol" corresponds to an "aggregate" of
states in the continuous model. Since these symbolic models are of the same
nature of the models used in computer science to describe software and
hardware, they provide a unified language to study problems of control in which
software and hardware interact with the physical world. Furthermore the use of
symbolic models enables one to leverage techniques from supervisory control and
algorithms from game theory for controller synthesis purposes. In this paper we
show that every incrementally globally asymptotically stable nonlinear control
system is approximately equivalent (bisimilar) to a symbolic model. The
approximation error is a design parameter in the construction of the symbolic
model and can be rendered as small as desired. Furthermore if the state space
of the control system is bounded the obtained symbolic model is finite. For
digital control systems, and under the stronger assumption of incremental
input-to-state stability, symbolic models can be constructed through a suitable
quantization of the inputs.Comment: Corrected typo
Approximately bisimilar symbolic models for incrementally stable switched systems
Switched systems constitute an important modeling paradigm faithfully
describing many engineering systems in which software interacts with the
physical world. Despite considerable progress on stability and stabilization of
switched systems, the constant evolution of technology demands that we make
similar progress with respect to different, and perhaps more complex,
objectives. This paper describes one particular approach to address these
different objectives based on the construction of approximately equivalent
(bisimilar) symbolic models for switched systems. The main contribution of this
paper consists in showing that under standard assumptions ensuring incremental
stability of a switched system (i.e. existence of a common Lyapunov function,
or multiple Lyapunov functions with dwell time), it is possible to construct a
finite symbolic model that is approximately bisimilar to the original switched
system with a precision that can be chosen a priori. To support the
computational merits of the proposed approach, we use symbolic models to
synthesize controllers for two examples of switched systems, including the
boost DC-DC converter.Comment: 17 page
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