A new computational approach to the synthesis of fixed order controllers

The research described in this dissertation deals with an open problem concerning the synthesis of controllers of xed order and structure. This problem is encountered in a variety of applications. Simply put, the problem may be put as the determination of the set, S of controller parameter vectors, K = (k1; k2; : : : ; kl), that render Hurwitz a family (indexed by F) of complex polynomials of the form fP0(s; ) + Pl i=1 Pi(s; )ki; 2 Fg, where the polynomials Pj(s; ); j = 0; : : : ; l are given data. They are specied by the plant to be controlled, the structure of the controller desired and the performance that the controllers are expected to achieve. Simple examples indicate that the set S can be non-convex and even be disconnected. While the determination of the non-emptiness of S is decidable and amenable to methods such as the quantier elimination scheme, such methods have not been computationally tractable and more importantly, do not provide a reasonable approximation for the set of controllers. Practical applications require the construction of a set of controllers that will enable a control engineer to check the satisfaction of performance criteria that may not be mathematically well characterized. The transient performance criteria often fall into this category. From the practical viewpoint of the construction of approximations for S, this dissertation is dierent from earlier work in the literature on this problem. A novel feature of the proposed algorithm is the exploitation of the interlacing property of Hurwitz polynomials to provide arbitrarily tight outer and inner approximation to S. The approximation is given in terms of the union of polyhedral sets which are constructed systematically using the Hermite-Biehler theorem and the generalizations of the Descartes' rule of signs.