Optimal Two Player LQR State Feedback With Varying Delay

This paper presents an explicit solution to a two player distributed LQR problem in which communication between controllers occurs across a communication link with varying delay. We extend known dynamic programming methods to accommodate this varying delay, and show that under suitable assumptions, the optimal control actions are linear in their information, and that the resulting controller has piecewise linear dynamics dictated by the current effective delay regime.Comment: Extended version of IFAC '14 submissio

Uncertain Multivariable Systems from a State Space Perspective

This paper introduces some new extensions of μ analysis for LTI systems with structured uncertainty to time varying and nonlinear systems

MathSBML: a package for manipulating SBML-based biological models

Summary: MathSBML is a Mathematica package designed for manipulating Systems Biology Markup Language (SBML) models. It converts SBML models into Mathematica data structures and provides a platform for manipulating and evaluating these models. Once a model is read by MathSBML, it is fully compatible with standard Mathematica functions such as NDSolve (a differential-algebraic equations solver). Math-SBML also provides an application programming interface for viewing, manipulating, running numerical simulations; exporting SBML models; and converting SBML models in to other formats, such as XPP, HTML and FORTRAN. By accessing the full breadth of Mathematica functionality, MathSBML is fully extensible to SBML models of any size or complexity. Availability: Open Source (LGPL) at http://www.sbml.org and http://www.sf.net/projects/sbml. Supplementary information: Extensive online documentation is available at http://www.sbml.org/mathsbml.html. Additional examples are provided at http://www.sbml.org/software/mathsbml/bioinformatics-application-not

The ℋ_2 Control Problem for Quadratically Invariant Systems With Delays

This technical note gives a new solution to the output feedback ℋ_2 problem for quadratically invariant communication delay patterns. A characterization of all stabilizing controllers satisfying the delay constraints is given and the decentralized ℋ_2 problem is cast as a convex model matching problem. The main result shows that the model matching problem can be reduced to a finite-dimensional quadratic program. A recursive state-space method for computing the optimal controller based on vectorization is given

Robust control in the quantum domain

Recent progress in quantum physics has made it possible to perform experiments in which individual quantum systems are monitored and manipulated in real time. The advent of such new technical capabilities provides strong motivation for the development of theoretical and experimental methodologies for quantum feedback control. The availability of such methods would enable radically new approaches to experimental physics in the quantum realm. Likewise, the investigation of quantum feedback control will introduce crucial new considerations to control theory, such as the uniquely quantum phenomena of entanglement and measurement back-action. The extension of established analysis techniques from control theory into the quantum domain may also provide new insight into the dynamics of complex quantum systems. We anticipate that the successful formulation of an input-output approach to the analysis and reduction of large quantum systems could have very general applications in non-equilibrium quantum statistical mechanics and in the nascent field of quantum information theory.Comment: 12 pages, 1 figur

Robust Control with an H_2 Performance Objective

This paper considers the problem of designing robust controllers with an H_2 performance objective. A modified version of μ-synthesis is proposed and compared with two alternative schemes

Relative age effect in elite soccer: more early-born players, but no better valued, and no paragon clubs or countries

The paper analyses two datasets of elite soccer players (top 1000 professionals and UEFA Under-19 Youth League). In both, we find a Relative Age Effect (RAE) for frequency, but not for value. That is, while there are more players born at the start of the competition year, their transfer values are no higher, nor are they given more game time. We use Poisson regression to derive a transparent index of the discrimination present in RAE. Also, because Poisson is valid for small frequency counts, it supports analysis at the disaggregated levels of country and club. From this, we conclude there are no paragon clubs or countries immune to RAE; that is clubs and countries do not differ systematically in the RAE they experience; also, that Poisson regression is a powerful and flexible method of analysing RAE data

File Fragmentation over an Unreliable Channel

It has been recently discovered that heavy-tailed file completion time can result from protocol interaction even when file sizes are light-tailed. A key to this phenomenon is the RESTART feature where if a file transfer is interrupted before it is completed, the transfer needs to restart from the beginning. In this paper, we show that independent or bounded fragmentation guarantees light-tailed file completion time as long as the file size is light-tailed, i.e., in this case, heavy-tailed file completion time can only originate from heavy-tailed file sizes. If the file size is heavy-tailed, then the file completion time is necessarily heavy-tailed. For this case, we show that when the file size distribution is regularly varying, then under independent or bounded fragmentation, the completion time tail distribution function is asymptotically upper bounded by that of the original file size stretched by a constant factor. We then prove that if the failure distribution has non-decreasing failure rate, the expected completion time is minimized by dividing the file into equal sized fragments; this optimal fragment size is unique but depends on the file size. We also present a simple blind fragmentation policy where the fragment sizes are constant and independent of the file size and prove that it is asymptotically optimal. Finally, we bound the error in expected completion time due to error in modeling of the failure process