Silviu-Iulian Niculescu – författare

This book is a study of the effects of delays, stemming from a range of sources, on the behaviour of traffic flow. It provides the reader with theoretical approaches and computational tools, including existing tools from the field of control systems, for analysing the stability and slinky features of dynamical systems affected by time delays. Through examples and case-studies it shows how to implement these tools on a variety of traffic-flow models.

The models considered are microscopic flow models (dealing with the behaviour of individual vehicles rather than the study of group effects) formulated as continuous-time deterministic delay-differential equations. Physiological lag (human reaction), mechanical time-lag and the delay time of vehicular motion are only a few examples of the multitude of delays that are applied to a traffic model. Such delays may also be discrete (constant), distributed or time-varying; the text concentrates on the constant and distributed delays associated with the representation of linear stability and slinky features to allow a compact and analytically tractable demonstration of the intricacy of delay effects.

Readers with an academic research background in applied maths, vehicle dynamics and traffic modelling and graduate students working in those fields will find this brief to be an interesting source of results and openings for further work. It is also useful for engineers working on traffic-management systems and the guidance and control of autonomous vehicles.

Optimal Design of Distributed Control and Embedded Systems focuses on the design of special control and scheduling algorithms based on system structural properties as well as on analysis of the influence of induced time-delay on systems performances. It treats the optimal design of distributed and embedded control systems (DCESs) with respect to communication and calculation-resource constraints, quantization aspects, and potential time-delays induced by the associated communication and calculation model.

Particular emphasis is put on optimal control signal scheduling based on the system state. In order to render this complex optimization problem feasible in real time, a time decomposition is based on periodicity induced by the static scheduling is operated. The authors present a co-design approach which subsumes the synthesis of the optimal control laws and the generation of an optimal schedule of control signals on real-time networks as well as the execution of control tasks on a single processor. The authors also operate a control structure modification or a control switching based on a thorough analysis of the influence of the induced time-delay system influence on stability and system performance in order to optimize DCES performance in case of calculation and communication resource limitations. Although the richness and variety of classes of DCES preclude a completely comprehensive treatment or a single “best” method of approaching them all, this co-design approach has the best chance of rendering this problem feasible and finding the optimal or some sub-optimal solution. The text is rounded out with references to such applications as car suspension and unmanned vehicles.

Optimal Design of Distributed Control and Embedded Systems will be of most interest to academic researchers working on the mathematical theory of DCES but the wide range of environments in which they are used also promotes the relevance of the text forcontrol practitioners working in the avionics, automotive, energy-production, space exploration and many other industries.

This brief examines a deterministic, ODE-based model for gene regulatory networks (GRN) that incorporates nonlinearities and time-delayed feedback. An introductory chapter provides some insights into molecular biology and GRNs. The mathematical tools necessary for studying the GRN model are then reviewed, in particular Hill functions and Schwarzian derivatives. One chapter is devoted to the analysis of GRNs under negative feedback with time delays and a special case of a homogenous GRN is considered. Asymptotic stability analysis of GRNs under positive feedback is then considered in a separate chapter, in which conditions leading to bi-stability are derived. Graduate and advanced undergraduate students and researchers in control engineering, applied mathematics, systems biology and synthetic biology will find this brief to be a clear and concise introduction to the modeling and analysis of GRNs.

In this brief the authors establish a new frequency-sweeping framework to solve the complete stability problem for time-delay systems with commensurate delays. The text describes an analytic curve perspective which allows a deeper understanding of spectral properties focusing on the asymptotic behavior of the characteristic roots located on the imaginary axis as well as on properties invariant with respect to the delay parameters. This asymptotic behavior is shown to be related by another novel concept, the dual Puiseux series which helps make frequency-sweeping curves useful in the study of general time-delay systems. The comparison of Puiseux and dual Puiseux series leads to three important results:

Academic researchers and graduate students interested in time-delay systems and practitioners working in a variety of fields – engineering, economics and the life sciences involving transfer of materials, energy or information which are inherently non-instantaneous, will find the results presented here useful in tackling some of the complicated problems posed by delays.

This book reports the results of exhaustive research work on modeling and control of vertical oil well drilling systems. It is focused on the analysis of the system-dynamic response and the elimination of the most damaging drill string vibration modes affecting overall perforation performance: stick-slip (torsional vibration) and bit-bounce (axial vibration). The text is organized in three parts.

The first part, Modeling, presents lumped- and distributed-parameter models that allow the dynamic behavior of the drill string to be characterized; a comprehensive mathematical model taking into account mechanical and electric components of the overall drilling system is also provided. The distributed nature of the system is accommodated by considering a system of wave equations subject to nonlinear boundary conditions; this model is transformed into a pair of neutral-type time-delay equations which can overcome the complexity involved in the analysis and simulation of the partial differential equation model.

The second part, Analysis, is devoted to the study of the response of the system described by the time-delay model; important properties useful for analyzing system stability are investigated and frequency- and time-domain techniques are reviewed.

Part III, Control, concerns the design of stabilizing control laws aimed at eliminating undesirable drilling vibrations; diverse control techniques based on infinite--dimensional system representations are designed and evaluated. The control proposals are shown to be effective in suppressing stick-slip and bit-bounce so that a considerable improvement of the overall drilling performance can be achieved.

This self-contained book provides operational guidelines to avoid drilling vibrations. Furthermore, since the modeling and control techniques presented here can be generalized to treat diverse engineering problems, it constitutes a useful resource to researchers working on control and its engineering application in oil well drilling.

In this book, the authors propose efficient characterizations of the non-convex regions that appear in many control problems, such as those involving collision/obstacle avoidance and, in a broader sense, in the description of feasible sets for optimization-based control design involving contradictory objectives. 

The text deals with a large class of systems that require the solution of appropriate optimization problems over a feasible region, which is neither convex nor compact. The proposed approach uses the combinatorial notion of hyperplane arrangement, partitioning the space by a finite collection of hyperplanes, to describe non-convex regions efficiently. Mixed-integer programming techniques are then applied to propose acceptable formulations of the overall problem. Multiple constructions may arise from the same initial problem, and their complexity under various parameters - space dimension, number of binary variables, etc. - is also discussed.

This book is auseful tool for academic researchers and graduate students interested in non-convex systems working in control engineering area, mobile robotics and/or optimal planning and decision-making.

Creating some links between control feedback and biology modeling communities based on similarities in modeling, observing and perceiving alive structures, and analyzing interconnections between biological structures and subsystems was the main objective of this volume.

In this context, biology systems need appropriate analysis tools due to their structure and hierarchy, complexity and environment interference, and we believe that these aspects may generate interesting research topics in control area. Indeed, several works, raising the potential impact of control developments to bring some beginning of answers in the context of biological systems, have been published in the recent years.

The idea of this book was conceived in the context mentioned above with the objective to help in claiming many of the problems for control researchers, starting discussions and opening interactive debates between the control and biology communities, and, finally, to alert graduate students to the many interesting ideas at the frontier between control feedback theory and biology.