Section: Scientific Foundations

Classical system theory

Systems, Control and Signal Processing

Systems, control and signal processing constitute the main foundations of the research work of the project-team. We have been particularly interested in numerical and algorithmic aspects. This research which has been the driving force behind the creation of Scilab has nourished this software over the years thanks to which, today, Scilab and now ScicosLab contain most of the modern tools in control and signal processing. ScicosLab is a vehicle by which theoretical results of the project-team concerning areas such as classical, modern and robust control, signal processing and optimization, is made available to industry and academia.

Ties between this fundamental research and ScicosLab are very strong. Indeed, even the design of the software itself, elementary functions and data structures are heavily influenced by the results of this research. For example, even elementary operations such as basic manipulation of polynomial fractions have been implemented using a generalization of the the state-space theory developed as part of our research on implicit systems. These ties are of course normal since Scilab has been primarily developed for applications in automatics.

Scilab has created for our research team new contacts with engineers in industry and other research groups. Being used in real applications, it has provided a guide for choosing new research directions. For example, we have developed the robust control tools in collaboration with industrial users. Similarly for the LMI toolbox, which we have developed with the help of other research groups. It should also be noted that most of the basic systems and control functions are based on algorithms developed in the European research project Slicot in which METALAU has taken part.

Implicit Systems

Implicit systems are a natural framework for modeling physical phenomena. We work on theoretical and practical problems associated with such systems in particular in applications such as failure detection and dynamical system modeling and simulation.

Constructing complex models of dynamical systems by interconnecting elementary components leads very often to implicit systems. An implicit dynamical system is one where the equations representing the behavior of the system are of the algebraic-differential type. If represent the “state” of the system, an implicit system is often described as follows:

(1)

where is the time derivative of , t is the time and the vector z contains the external variables (inputs and outputs) of the system. Indeed it is an important property of implicit systems that outside variables interacting with the system need not be characterized a priori as inputs or outputs, as it is the case with explicit dynamical systems. For example if we model a capacitor in an electrical circuit as a dynamical system, it would not be possible to label a-priori the external variables, in this case the currents and voltages associated with the capacitor, as inputs and outputs. The physical laws governing the capacitor simply impose dynamical constraints on these variables. Depending on the configuration of the circuit, it is sometimes possible to specify some external variables as inputs and the rest as outputs (and thus make the system explicit) however in doing so system structure and modularity is often lost. That is why, usually, even if an implicit system can be converted into an explicit system, it is more advantages to keep the implicit model.

It turns out that many of the methods developed for the analysis and synthesis of control systems modeled as explicit systems can be extended to implicit systems. In fact, in many cases, these methods are more naturally derived in this more general setting and allows for a deeper understanding of the existing theory. In the past few years, we have studied a number of systems and control problems in the implicit framework.

For example in the linear discrete time case, we have revisited classical problems such as observer design, Kalman filtering, residual generation to extend them to the implicit case or have used techniques from implicit system theory to derive more direct and efficient design methods. Another area where implicit system theory has been used is failure detection. In particular in the multi-model approach where implicit systems arise naturally from combining multiple explicit models.

We have also done work on nonlinear implicit systems. For example nonlinear implicit system theory has been used to develop a predictive control system and a novel nonlinear observer design methodology. Research on nonlinear implicit systems continues in particular because of the development of the “implicit” version of Scicos.