Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning for non-minimum phase plants

Model reference control design methods fail when the plant has one or more non-minimum phase zeros that are not included in the reference model, leading possibly to an unstable closed loop. This is a very serious problem for data-based control design methods, where the plant is typically unknown. In this paper, we extend the Virtual Reference Feedback Tuning method to non-minimum phase plants. This extension is based on the idea proposed in Lecchini and Gevers (2002) for Iterative Feedback Tuning. We present a simple two-step procedure that can cope with the situation where the unknown plant may or may not have non-minimum phase zeros.     

Supply chain coordination with risk sensitive retailer under target sales rebate

Target sales rebate (TSR) contracts have been shown to be useful in coordinating supply chains with risk-neutral agents. However, there have been few studies on the cases with risk sensitive agents. As a result, based on the classic Markowitz portfolio theory in finance, we carry out in this paper a mean–variance (MV) analysis of supply chains under TSR contracts. We study a supply chain with a single supplier and a single risk averse retailer. We propose TSR contracts for achieving coordination. We demonstrate how TSR contracts can coordinate the supply chain which takes into consideration the degree of risk aversion of the retailer. We find that the supplier can coordinate the channel with flexible TSR contracts. In addition, we extend the supply chain model to include sales effort decision of the retailer. Conditions for TSR contracts to coordinate the supply chain with sales effort of retailer are also derived.     

Explicit/multi-parametric model predictive control (MPC) of linear discrete-time systems by dynamic and multi-parametric programming

This work presents a new algorithm for solving the explicit/multi-parametric model predictive control (or mp-MPC) problem for linear, time-invariant discrete-time systems, based on dynamic programming and multi-parametric programming techniques. The algorithm features two key steps: (i) a dynamic programming step, in which the mp-MPC problem is decomposed into a set of smaller subproblems in which only the current control, state variables, and constraints are considered, and (ii) a multi-parametric programming step, in which each subproblem is solved as a convex multi-parametric programming problem, to derive the control variables as an explicit function of the states. The key feature of the proposed method is that it overcomes potential limitations of previous methods for solving multi-parametric programming problems with dynamic programming, such as the need for global optimization for each subproblem of the dynamic programming step.     

Parameter estimation with scarce measurements

In this paper, the problems of parameter estimation are addressed for systems with scarce measurements. A gradient-based algorithm is derived to estimate the parameters of the input–output representation with scarce measurements, and the convergence properties of the parameter estimation and unavailable output estimation are established using the Kronecker lemma and the deterministic version of the martingale convergence theorem. Finally, an example is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.     

Difference algebra and system identification

The framework of differential algebra, especially Ritt’s algorithm, has turned out to be a useful tool when analyzing the identifiability of certain nonlinear continuous-time model structures. This framework provides conceptually interesting means to analyze complex nonlinear model structures via the much simpler linear regression models. One difficulty when working with continuous-time signals is dealing with white noise in nonlinear systems. In this paper, difference algebraic techniques, which mimic the differential-algebraic techniques, are presented. Besides making it possible to analyze discrete-time model structures, this opens up the possibility of dealing with noise. Unfortunately, the corresponding discrete-time identifiability results are not as conclusive as in continuous time. In addition, an alternative elimination scheme to Ritt’s algorithm will be formalized and the resulting algorithm is analyzed when applied to a special form of the nfir model structure.     

Reachability determination in acyclic Petri nets by cell enumeration approach

Reachability is one of the most important behavioral properties of Petri nets. We propose in this paper a novel approach for solving the fundamental equation in the reachability analysis of acyclic Petri nets, which has been known to be NP-complete. More specifically, by adopting a revised version of the cell enumeration method for an arrangement of hyperplanes in discrete geometry, we develop an efficient solution scheme to identify firing count vector solution(s) to the fundamental equation on a bounded integer set, with a complexity bound of O((nu)^n−m), where n is the number of transitions, m is the number of places and u is the upper bound of the number of firings for all individual transitions.     

Vision-based control for rigid body stabilization

This paper addresses the problem of stabilizing to a desired equilibrium point an eye-in-hand system, which consists of a single camera mounted on a rigid body free to move on . It is assumed that there is a collection of landmarks fixed in the environment and that the image coordinates of those landmarks are provided to the system by an on-board CCD camera. The proposed method addresses not only the problem of stabilization but also that of maintaining feature visibility along the system’s trajectory. The resulting solution consists of a feedback control law based on the current and desired image coordinates and reconstructed attitude and depth ratio information, which guarantees that (i) the desired equilibrium point is an almost global attractor; (ii) a set of necessary conditions for feature visibility holds throughout the system’s trajectories; and (iii) the image of a predefined feature point is kept inside the camera’s field of view.     

Feedback stabilization for high order feedforward nonlinear time-delay systems

This paper investigates the problem of global strong stabilization by state feedback, for a family of high order feedforward nonlinear time-delay systems. The uncertain nonlinearities are assumed to satisfy a polynomial growth assumption with an input or delayed input dependent rate. With the help of the appropriate Lyapunov–Krasovskii functionals, and a rescaling transformation with a gain to be tuned online by a dynamic equation, we propose a dynamic low gain state feedback control scheme. A simulation example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed design procedure.     

Identification and data-driven model reduction of state-space representations of lossless and dissipative systems from noise-free data

We illustrate procedures to identify a state-space representation of a lossless or dissipative system from a given noise-free trajectory; important special cases are passive systems and bounded-real systems. Computing a rank-revealing factorization of a Gramian-like matrix constructed from the data, a state sequence can be obtained; the state-space equations are then computed by solving a system of linear equations. This idea is also applied to perform model reduction by obtaining a balanced realization directly from data and truncating it to obtain a reduced-order model.