Plenary Speakers
Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland
Scalable control design for systems with flexible structure
Abstract: Ubiquitous sensing and actuation technologies are expected to impact a wide range of applications, including transportation, manufacturing, smart energy systems, and public utilities. Future systems will be characterised by an unparalleled level of interconnection and a flexible structure allowing subsystems to enter and leave over time. In absence of a reference model, flexibility must be mirrored in the control layers. This raises the problem of designing local regulators in a scalable fashion, by using information from a limited number of subsystems and yet guaranteeing stability and safety for the whole system. In this talk I will present various approaches to scalable control design. I will first address the case of subsystems with physical constraints and discuss synthesis procedures based on the notion of robust control invariance. Then, I will focus on a specific application - islanded microgrids with flexible structure - and show how passivity theory and consensus algorithms can be used for the modular design of controllers providing global voltage stability and current sharing. Simulations and lab experiments will be presented for illustrating the applicability of the proposed methods.
Biography: Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Universita' degli Studi di Pavia in 1999. Since September 2016 he is Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. In spring 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Neural Computing Research Group, University of Birmingham, UK. In fall 1998, he joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. He was appointed Oberassistent at ETH, in 2000. In 2002, he joined INRIA, Rocquencourt, France, as a Research Fellow. From March to October 2005, he was researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. From 2005 to August 2016, he was Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell'Informazione of the Universita' degli Studi di Pavia. His research interests include scalable control, microgrids, networked control systems, hybrid systems and machine learning.Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate was the recipient of the Researcher Mobility Grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research in 2005. He is currently a member of the IFAC Technical Committees on Control Design and Optimal Control, and the Technical Committee on Systems Biology of the IEEE SMC society. He is Editor at large for the 2019 ACC and has been serving on the editorial board of Automatica (for three terms) and Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.
Jacquelien Scherpen
University of Groningen, The Netherlands
Classical model reduction methods for structure preserving reduction of networks of systems
Abstract: So far, most of the reduction techniques for networks of systems rely on clustering, because they easily preserve the network structure in the reduced model. Application of the classical methods that are very relevant from a control systems perspective, such as balancing and moment matching based model reduction, generally do not preserve the network structure. In this presentation we focus on the generalisation of these classical methods in such a way that both the amount of nodes and the dynamics of the nodes are reduced, while preserving relevant network and dynamics structures. The developments are done for networks of linear systems, as well as networks with Lur’e dynamics on the nodes. Furthermore, a priori error bounds will be provided, and relevant small and large scale examples will be used to illustrate the results.
Biography:
Jacquelien M. A. Scherpen received the M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in applied mathematics from the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, in 1990 and 1994, respectively. She was with Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands, from 1994 to 2006. Since September 2006, she has been a Professor with the University of Groningen, at the Engineering and Technology institute Groningen (ENTEG) of the Faculty of Science and Engineering, Groningen, The Netherlands. She has been scientific director of ENTEG from 2013 til 2019, and is director of the Groningen Engineering Center. She has held visiting research positions at The University of Tokyo, Japan, Universite de Compiegne, SUPELEC, Gif-sur-Yvette, France, and the Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, USA. Her research interests include model reduction methods for nonlinear systems and for networked systems, nonlinear control methods, modeling and control of physical systems with applications to electrical circuits, electromechanical systems and mechanical systems, and distributed optimal control applications for smart energy systems. Jacquelien Scherpen has been an Associate Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, the International Journal of Robust and Nonlinear Control (IJRNC), and the IMA Journal of Mathematical Control and Information. She is on the Editorial Board of the IJRNC. She is Vice President of the European Control Association (EUCA), is vice chair of the publication committee of the International Federation on Automatic Control (IFAC), and is a member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS).