Ph.D. at The University of Newcastle on Robust model predictive control

Christian Løvaas will pursue a PhD in controlsystems technology at The University of Newcastle. The topic of research, robustness in MPC, falls within the fascinating general area of control systems technology, which is an internationally recognized area of research at The University of Newcastle in Australia. Control systems technology seeks to automate and control physical processes, and it has a wide domain of applications within transport, medicine and industry. MPC stands for model predictive contro l which captures two of the main aspects of this control policy, namely "model" and "prediction". MPC determines its manipulated signals or "control inputs" to a process at any instant of time by using a mathematical model to predict future behavior of th e process. The research will focus on "robust" and "fast" MPC. "Robust" refers to designs that explicitly, in order to further improve process performance, takes into account the fact that a mathematical model rarely will predict process behavior exactly. While "fast", refers to studies on reducing the time spent by a computer running MPC to deduce the desired control inputs from predictions of process behavior. The motivation for reducing computation time is to successfully employ MPC technology on large r and faster systems. The proposed topics are very exciting and we will initially be looking at some promising connections to other control policies in a hope to combine and fully understand their potentials.