Rationale
Embedded systems form a key growth area in information and communication technologies with a broad range of applications.
Existing and emerging areas include automotive and transportation industry, energy management, environmental monitoring,
factory automation, personal communication or process and biomedical industries. The notion of hybrid systems offers a
strong theoretical and unified framework to cope with modelling, analysis and control design of embedded systems.
The theory of hybrid systems has been the subject of intensive research
in the last decade and a large number of diverse and challenging
problems have been investigated. Nevertheless many important
mathematical problems remain open. These include: analysis and control
of hybrid systems with a periodic behavior, control of systems with
actuator constraints and hybrid control design with prescribed
performance. These open problems are mainly motivated by their
practical impact. Hybrid systems with periodic behavior cover an
important classes of embedded systems. Available approaches are mainly
dedicated to specific applications of these devices and there is a
serious lack of rigorous tools today
for analyzing and synthesizing control algorithms for such systems. To
improve their performance, the objective is to go beyond the classical
simplified modelling which does not captures the heterogeneity nature
of these systems.
The focus of this research is on systematic development
of tools for stability analysis and observer based control design for
hybrid systems while obeying operating constraints and performance
specifications. To this end, the three partners (CRAN, IECN and LAAS)
lean on their complementary competences and recent advances in
stability
analysis of switched systems, control design with actuators constraints
and multiobjective performance optimization.
