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Full-Text Articles in Engineering

Target Control Of Networked Systems, Isaac S. Klickstein Apr 2020

Target Control Of Networked Systems, Isaac S. Klickstein

Mechanical Engineering ETDs

The control of complex networks is an emerging field yet it has already garnered interest from across the scientific disciplines, from robotics to sociology. It has quickly been noticed that many of the classical techniques from controls engineering, while applicable, are not as illuminating as they were for single systems of relatively small dimension. Instead, properties borrowed from graph theory provide equivalent but more practical conditions to guarantee controllability, reachability, observability, and other typical properties of interest to the controls engineer when dealing with large networked systems. This manuscript covers three topics investigated in detail by the author: (i) the …


Sufficient Conditions For Optimal Control Problems With Terminal Constraints And Free Terminal Times With Applications To Aerospace, Sankalp Kishan Bhan May 2019

Sufficient Conditions For Optimal Control Problems With Terminal Constraints And Free Terminal Times With Applications To Aerospace, Sankalp Kishan Bhan

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Motivated by the flight control problem of designing control laws for a Ground Collision Avoidance System (GCAS), this thesis formulates sufficient conditions for a strong local minimum for a terminally constrained optimal control problem with a free-terminal time. The conditions develop within the framework of a construction of a field of extremals by means of the method of characteristics, a procedure for the solution of first-order linear partial differential equations, but modified to apply to the Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman equation of optimal control. Additionally, the thesis constructs these sufficient conditions for optimality with a mathematically rigorous development. The proof uses an approach …


Numerical Methods For Nonlinear Optimal Control Problems And Their Applications In Indoor Climate Control, Runxin He Aug 2017

Numerical Methods For Nonlinear Optimal Control Problems And Their Applications In Indoor Climate Control, Runxin He

McKelvey School of Engineering Theses & Dissertations

Efficiency, comfort, and convenience are three major aspects in the design of control systems for residential Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC) units. In this dissertation, we study optimization-based algorithms for HVAC control that minimizes energy consumption while maintaining a desired temperature, or even human comfort in a room. Our algorithm uses a Computer Fluid Dynamics (CFD) model, mathematically formulated using Partial Differential Equations (PDEs), to describe the interactions between temperature, pressure, and air flow. Our model allows us to naturally formulate problems such as controlling the temperature of a small region of interest within a room, or to control …