Computer Aided Control System Design
Chair: Vasile Sima      
IEEE 
Control Systems Society

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Abstract

This site intends to provide information on numerical methods and software for CACSD. It contains links to research projects as well as to research groups and individuals active in the field. Links to the available numerical software for systems and control and related software are also provided.

The Working Group on Control Numerics and Software is part of the IEEE Control Systems Society technical committee on Computer Aided Control System Design.

Introduction

Systems and control theory are disciplines widely used to describe, control, and optimize industrial, economical, and biological processes. There are now a huge amount of theoretical results and a variety of computational approaches and numerical algorithms to solve various system analysis and design problems. Although theoretically well founded, some of these methods fail when applied to real-life problems, which often tend to be ill-posed or of high dimension. Failures are frequently due to the lack of numerical robustness when algorithms are implemented and executed in a finite-precision environment. The last years have witnessed significant advances in the reliability and efficiency of the numerical algorithms and software for Computer Aided Control System Design (CACSD). An objective has been to develop robust numerical control software with overall performance similar to that of well established numerical linear algebra packages.

A contemporary research streamline in numerical algorithms is the exploitation of the structural information in the underlying computational problem. The main advantage of developing structure-preserving algorithms is that the structural properties of a problem are preserved during finite precision computations. This allows the computed result to be interpreted as the exact solution of the original problem with perturbed input data, which may not be the case if the properties of the problem are changed due to rounding errors. Structure exploitation not only increases the reliability of the returned results, but often also improves their accuracy. Moreover, this usually results in a reduction of the computational effort and memory requirements. Without exploiting the problem structure, many computational tasks are simply too expensive to be performed. 

Structure-preserving algorithms have been developed for several control domains and high quality robust software implementations are available on the net. Many of the publicly available control software provide alternative computational solutions which either complement and sometimes outperform the commercially available control software, or serve for advancing of commercial software as well.  

Goals

This site is trying to provide up-to-date information to support an informed selection and usage of the most appropriate algorithms and software to solve practical control problems. Many research results on developing new algorithms and associated robust numerical software for CACSD are available electronically. Therefore we provide links to research groups as well as to individuals active in these areas. Information is also provided on available numerical software for systems and control as well as on related numerical software. 

Vasile Sima

This page was last updated April 8, 2005.