Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Traditional industrial facilities are monitored and controlled through industrial computers, in which time drivenoperations are the norm. Digital control is the paradigm for such time driven systems. This digital control paradigm uses a fundamental assumption that all signals andsystems are sampled periodically in time. However, such an assumption is no longer valid in modernindustrial systems because of two reasons. First, integrating new communication and computing technologies generates a new class of systems called cyber-physical systems, in which network protocols andreal-time computer algorithms evolve by events, and are event driven. Second, most existing industrial facilities are still operated by human operators through alarm monitoring systems. Could industrial plants be fully automated, without theintervention of operators at all? This would require incorporating alarm systems with controlsystems; but alarm systems are event driven, violating the periodicity assumption.The main research objective is to develop aunified paradigm for analysis and design of hybrid time and event driven control systems. Such systems present tremendous challenges for control engineers and designersbecause of the interactions among control, computation, and communication components, and inclusion of bothtime and event driven mechanism. The proposed research program covers modeling, state estimation, and control design of time and event driven systems, integration of control and alarm systems, and studying theproperties of importance to both control and monitoring purposes, such as stability, control performance, communication and computing resource usage, fault detection accuracy,and fault diagnosis capabilities.The research problems are complex and challenging, requiring a great deal of innovation and originality touncover new solutions which are effective and efficient. Since event driven systems are in general time-varying and nonlinear, traditional frequency-domain based methods are not applicable. Theplanned approach would be in general time-domain, using state-space models for continuous-time processes,time based equations for time and event driven operations, Lyapunov based argument for closed-loop stabilityanalysis, and optimization tools for analysis and design solutions.The proposed research program targets knowledge advance in the field of Control Systems which is relevant toelectrical, chemical, and mechanical Engineering. The novelty and expected significance include: It would address major challenges facing the control systems community, and hopefully impact both the theory andpractice; it would provide control engineers and practitioners with new tools for analysis and synthesis ofcyber-physical systems; finally, it would benefit Canadian industry by engaging in technology- and industry-relevant research student training.