Abstract: It is widely recognized that many of the most important
challenges faced by control engineers involve the development of
methods to design and analyze systems having components most naturally
described by differential equations interacting with components best
modeled using sequential logic. This situation can arise both in the
development of high volume, cost sensitive, consumer products and in the
design and certification of one of a kind, complex and expensive
systems. The response of the control community to this challenge
includes work on limited communication control, learning control,
control languages, and various efforts on hybrid systems. This work has
led to important new ideas but progress has been modest and the more
interesting results seem to lack the kind of unity that would lead to a
broadly inclusive theory. In this talk we describe an approach to
problems of this type based on sample path descriptions of finite state
Markov processes and suitable adaptations known results about linear
systems. The result is an insightful design technique yielding finite
state controllers for systems governed by differential equations. We
illustrate with concrete examples.
- This event has passed.