MAE Seminar: Controller Architectures: Tradeoffs between Performance and Complexity

McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium (MDEA)
Mihailo Jovanovic
Ming Hsieh Department of Electrical Engineering
University of Southern California
Abstract: This talk describes the design of controller architectures that achieve a desired tradeoff between performance of distributed systems and controller complexity. Our methodology consists of two steps. First, we design controller architecture by incorporating regularization functions into the optimal control problem, and second, we optimize the controller over the identified architecture. For large-scale networks of dynamical systems, the desired structural property is captured by limited information exchange between physical and controller layers and the regularization term penalizes the number of communication links. In the first step, the controller architecture is designed using a customized proximal augmented Lagrangian algorithm. This method exploits separability of the sparsity-promoting regularization terms and transforms the augmented Lagrangian into a form that is continuously differentiable and can be efficiently minimized using a variety of methods. Although structured optimal control problems generally are nonconvex, we identify classes of convex problems that arise in the design of symmetric systems, undirected consensus and synchronization networks, optimal selection of sensors and actuators, and decentralized control of positive systems. Examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the framework.
 
Bio: Mihailo Jovanovic is a professor of electrical engineering and the founding director of the Center for Systems and Control at the University of Southern California. He was on the faculty in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, from 2004 until 2017 and has held visiting positions with Stanford University and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications. His current research focuses on the design of controller architectures, dynamics and control of fluid flows, and fundamental limitations in the control of large networks of dynamical systems. He serves as the chair of the APS External Affairs Committee, an associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization; he previously served as a program vice-chair of the 55th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and as an associate editor of the IEEE Control Systems Society Conference Editorial Board. Jovanovic received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2007, the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2013 and the Distinguished Alumni Award from UC Santa Barbara in 2014.