Control law development for constrained systems

An aircraft is a dynamic system that naturally contains a variety of constraints and nonlinearities such as maximum load factor, angle of attack and control surface limitations. Taking these limitations into account in the design of control systems becomes increasingly important as performance and complexity of the controlled systems is steadily increasing. One of the more popular optimal control methods that has been applied successfully in the industry are Model Predictive Control (MPC) but in the aviation community this methodology has not yet been established. This is mainly due to the high real-time and safety requirements of an aircraft control system.

The overall aim is to investigate and apply optimal control methods for aerospace applications. The project aims to get an answer to how these control methods can be used in aeronautical applications that places great demands on robustness, and are very time critical. In the area of MPC the project intend to look at problems as feasibility and stability of the optimization algorithm and to develop good algorithms to generate "a-priori" solutions that can be easily implemented in a time critical system.

The project is a 2.5 year project that extends from January 2011 to Juni 2013. The project is financed by VINNOVA and the NFFP research program

A detailed description of the project and its organization can be found here.