Tuesday August 30 – 18.15-19.15 hrs – Aula Magna

	Carsten Scherer Professor of Mathematical Systems Theory University of Stuttgart Germany

Dissipation-based controller synthesis:
successes and challenges

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Abstract:
We look back at the exciting and highly successful development of merging the concept of dissipation with convex optimization algorithms for analyzing stability and performance of uncertain systems. The abstraction of a complex system interconnection into the standard plant setting allows handling a variety of uncertain components with different characteristics. We highlight how these analysis tools seamlessly extend, for some problem classes, to designing centralized or gain-scheduled controllers. Despite convexity of the underlying optimization problems, recent years have witnessed the necessity for better insights into issues of numerical stability and computational complexity. We argue that future needs for controlling large-scale uncertain systems will require developing a better understanding of how system interconnection structure translates into algorithmic structure for overcoming complexity barriers.

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Carsten Scherer biosketch:
Carsten W. Scherer received the Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Würzburg (Germany) in 1991. After six months of research at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands), the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) and Washington University (St. Louis) respectively, Dr. Scherer joined Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands) in 1993 where he held positions as an assistant and associate professor. In fall 1999 he spent a three months sabbatical as a visiting professor at the Automatic Control Laboratory of ETH Zurich.
From December 2001 until February 2010 he was a full professor within the Delft Center for Systems and Control at Delft University of Technology. Since March 2010 he holds the SRC SimTech Chair Mathematical Systems Theory in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Stuttgart in Germany. His main research interests cover various topics in applying optimization techniques for developing new advanced controller design algorithms and their application to mechatronics and aerospace systems. Dr. Scherer acted as the chair of the IFAC technical committee on Robust Control (2002-2008), and he has served as an associated editor for IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (1997-1999), Automatica (2000-2006) and Systems and Control Letters; he is currently active on the editorial board of the European Journal of Control.