João Saúde

João Saúde - Astrium

• Main host organisation: EADS Astrium, France
  
• Supervisors: Max Cerf/Hasnaa Zidani/Jean-Baptiste Caillau
• Nationality: Portuguese
• Fellowship duration: May 2011 - September 2012
• Background: João obtained a master's degree stochastic optimal control from the Technical University of Lisbon in 2011.
• Email address

SADCO Project title: Robust control, hybrid systems

A feature of many large scale, integrated control systems is that they are described by a combination of continuous and discrete or logical variables. Such control systems are called hybrid systems and have been the subject of much attention over the last decade. One example of an optimal control problem involving a hybrid system arises in multi-stage rocket control, where there are both continuous control variables such as actuator inputs and logical controls governing the rocket stage ejection strategy and switches in the structure of the dynamic description.

This project area will be concerned with first and higher order optimality conditions, dynamic programming and numerical methods for optimal control of hybrid systems. A range of research problems will be addressed. These include, on the fundamental theory side, questions of how the discrete variables can be chosen to improve robustness of performance, i.e. to reduce the sensitivity of the control system response to modelling errors, and of how to obtain a feedback representation of a hybrid optimal control. On the computational side, they will include the development of algorithms that effectively integrates the search for continuous and discrete variables