Nonlinear Robust Control Theory and Applications

Integrated modeling, identification, analysis, and design. The use of mathematical models to design large systems involves various instances and possibly iterations of modeling, identification, system design and controller synthesis, and various forms of analysis and simulation. Critical to this endeavor is the mathematical machinery to systematically address as many stages of this process as possible. Automating this process is the focus of the development of theory for virtual engineering (VE). The various VE activities are currently performed using a variety of mathematical ma-chinery, but we have recently developed an extremely promising unified framework for these various aspects of system design. In addition to providing an "interface " between system ID and control, it has the potential to overcome the major deficiencies in conventional system identification: the difficulty of using a priori information and rich uncertainty descriptions and still obtain global solutions for parameter estimates. This framework also allows ad-vances in different directions to combine readily. For example, it is clear how to combine progress in linear system ID with progress in nonlinear robustness analysis to produce non-linear system ID methods, a major need in VE. Our framework also clarifies many of th