In the process industries, cooling capacity is an important enabler for the facility to manufacture on specification product. The cooling water network is an important part of the over-all cooling system of the facility. In this research a cooling water circuit consisting of 3 cooling towers in parallel, 2 cooling water pumps in parallel, and 11 heat exchangers in parallel, is modelled. The model developed is based on first principles and captures the dynamic, non-linear, interactive nature of the plant. The modelled plant is further complicated by continuous, as well as discrete process variables, giving the model a hybrid nature. Energy consumption is included in the model as it is a very important parameter for plant operation. The model is fitted to real industry data by using a particle swarm optimisation approach. The model is suitable to be used for optimisation and control purposes. Cooling water networks are often not instrumented and actuated, nor controlled or optimised. Significant process benefits can be achieved by better process end-user temperature control, and direct monetary benefits can be obtained from electric power minimisation. A Hybrid Non-Linear Model Predictive Control strategy is developed for these control objectives, and simulated on the developed first principles dynamic model. Continuous and hybrid control cases are developed, and tested on process scenarios that reflect conditions seen in a real plant. Various alternative techniques are evaluated in order to solve the Hybrid Non-Linear Control problem. Gradient descent with momentum is chosen and configured to be used to solve the continuous control problem. For the discrete control problem a graph traversal algorithm is developed and joined to the continuous control algorithm to form a Hybrid Non-Linear Model Predictive controller. The potential monetary benefits that can be obtained by the plant owner through implementing the designed control strategy, are estimated. A powerful computation platform is designed for the plant model and controller simulations. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2019. / Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering / PhD / Unrestricted

L'autonomie est l'une des préoccupations majeures lors du développement de missions spatiales que l'objectif soit scientifique (exploration interplanétaire, observations, etc) ou commercial (service en orbite). Pour le rendez-vous spatial, cette autonomie dépend de la capacité embarquée de contrôle du mouvement relatif entre deux véhicules spatiaux. Dans le contexte du service aux satellites (dépannage, remplissage additionnel d'ergols, correction d'orbite, désorbitation en fin de vie, etc), la faisabilité de telles missions est aussi fortement liée à la capacité des algorithmes de guidage et contrôle à prendre en compte l'ensemble des contraintes opérationnelles (par exemple, saturation des propulseurs ou restrictions sur le positionnement relatif entre les véhicules) tout en maximisant la durée de vie du véhicule (minimisation de la consommation d'ergols). La littérature montre que ce problème a été étudié intensément depuis le début des années 2000. Les algorithmes proposés ne sont pas tout à fait satisfaisants. Quelques approches, par exemple, dégradent les contraintes afin de pouvoir fonder l'algorithme de contrôle sur un problème d'optimisation efficace. D'autres méthodes, si elles prennent en compte l'ensemble du problème, se montrent trop lourdes pour être embarquées sur de véritables calculateurs existants dans les vaisseaux spatiaux. Le principal objectif de cette thèse est le développement de nouveaux algorithmes efficaces et validés pour le guidage et le contrôle impulsif des engins spatiaux dans le contexte des phases dites de "hovering" du rendez-vous orbital, i.e. les étapes dans lesquelles un vaisseau secondaire doit maintenir sa position à l'intérieur d'une zone délimitée de l'espace relativement à un autre vaisseau principal. La première contribution présentée dans ce manuscrit utilise une nouvelle formulation mathématique des contraintes d'espace pour le mouvement relatif entre vaisseaux spatiaux pour la conception d'algorithmes de contrôle ayant un traitement calculatoire plus efficace comparativement aux approches traditionnelles. La deuxième et principale contribution est une stratégie de contrôle prédictif qui assure la convergence des trajectoires relatives vers la zone de "hovering", même en présence de perturbations ou de saturation des actionneurs. [...] / Autonomy is one of the major concerns during the planning of a space mission, whether its objective is scientific (interplanetary exploration, observations, etc.) or commercial (service in orbit). For space rendezvous, this autonomy depends on the on-board capacity of controlling the relative movement between two spacecraft. In the context of satellite servicing (troubleshooting, propellant refueling, orbit correction, end-of-life deorbit, etc.), the feasibility of such missions is also strongly linked to the ability of the guidance and control algorithms to account for all operational constraints (for example, thruster saturation or restrictions on the relative positioning between the vehicles) while maximizing the life of the vehicle (minimizing propellant consumption). The literature shows that this problem has been intensively studied since the early 2000s. However, the proposed algorithms are not entirely satisfactory. Some approaches, for example, degrade the constraints in order to be able to base the control algorithm on an efficient optimization problem. Other methods accounting for the whole set of constraints of the problem are too cumbersome to be embedded on real computers existing in the spaceships. The main object of this thesis is the development of new efficient and validated algorithms for the impulsive guidance and control of spacecraft in the context of the so-called "hovering" phases of the orbital rendezvous, i.e. the stages in which a secondary vessel must maintain its position within a bounded area of space relatively to another main vessel. The first contribution presented in this manuscript uses a new mathematical formulation of the space constraints for the relative motion between spacecraft for the design of control algorithms with more efficient computational processing compared to traditional approaches. The second and main contribution is a predictive control strategy that has been formally demonstrated to ensure the convergence of relative trajectories towards the "hovering" zone, even in the presence of disturbances or saturation of the actuators.[...]

Le déploiement des futurs véhicules autonomes promet d'avoir un impact socio-économique majeur, en raison de leur promesse d'être à la fois plus sûrs et plus efficaces que ceux conduits par des humains. Afin de satisfaire à ces attentes, la capacité des véhicules autonomes à planifier des trajectoires sûres et à manœuvrer efficacement dans le trafic sera capitale. Cependant, le problème de planification de trajectoire au milieu d'obstacles statiques ou mobiles a une combinatoire forte qui est encore aujourd'hui problématique pour les meilleurs algorithmes.Cette thèse explore une nouvelle approche de la planification de mouvement, basée sur l'utilisation de la notion de décision de conduite comme guide pour structurer le problème de planification en vue de faciliter sa résolution. Cette approche peut trouver des applications pour la conduite coopérative, par exemple pour coordonner plusieurs véhicules dans une intersection non signalisée, ainsi que pour la conduite autonome où chaque véhicule planifie sa trajectoire. Dans le cas de la conduite coopérative, les décisions correspondent au choix d'un ordonnancement des véhicules qui peut être avantageusement encodé comme un graphe. Cette thèse propose une représentation similaire pour la conduite autonome, où les décisions telles que dépasser ou non un véhicule sont nettement plus complexes. Une fois la décision prise, il devient aisé de déterminer la meilleure trajectoire y correspondant, en conduite coopérative comme autonome. Cette approche basée sur la prise de décision peut permettre d'améliorer la robustesse et l'efficacité de la planification de trajectoire, et ouvre d'intéressantes perspectives en permettant de combiner des approches mathématiques classiques avec des techniques plus modernes d'apprentissage automatisé. / The deployment of future self-driving vehicles is expected to have a major socioeconomic impact due to their promise to be both safer and more traffic-efficient than human-driven vehicles. In order to live up to these expectations, the ability of autonomous vehicles to plan safe trajectories and maneuver efficiently around obstacles will be paramount. However, motion planning among static or moving objects such as other vehicles is known to be a highly combinatorial problem, that remains challenging even for state-of-the-art algorithms. Indeed, the presence of obstacles creates exponentially many discrete maneuver choices, which are difficult even to characterize in the context of autonomous driving. This thesis explores a new approach to motion planning, based on using this notion of driving decisions as a guide to give structure to the planning problem, ultimately allowing easier resolution. This decision-based motion planning approach can find applications in cooperative driving, for instance to coordinate multiple vehicles through an unsignalized intersection, as well as in autonomous driving where a single vehicle plans its own trajectory. In the case of cooperative driving, decisions are known to correspond to the choice of a relative ordering for conflicting vehicles, which can be conveniently encoded as a graph. This thesis introduces a similar graph representation in the case of autonomous driving, where possible decisions -- such as overtaking the vehicle at a specific time -- are much more complex. Once a decision is made, planning the best possible trajectory corresponding to this decision is a much simpler problem, both in cooperative and autonomous driving. This decision-aware approach may lead to more robust and efficient motion planning, and opens exciting perspectives for combining classical mathematic programming algorithms with more modern machine learning techniques.

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Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Anwendung der indirekten Methoden zur automatisierten Lösung von einer bestimmten Klasse von Optimalen Steuerungsproblemen im Rahmen einer modellprädiktiven Regelung für Windenergieanlagen. In einem zweiten Teil wird der Einfluss dieser Regelungsmethode auf die Festigkeit des Triebstranges untersucht. Diese führt zu einer überproportionalen Beanspruchung und damit zu einer Reduktion der Betriebsfestigkeit. Es gilt entsprechende Randbedingungen für die der Regelung zugrunde liegenden Optimalen Steuerungsprobleme zu finden, so dass weiterhin die Energieausbeute maximiert werden kann, gleichzeitig jedoch die Beanspruchung durch die Regelung begrenzt wird.

In relation to the increasing interest in implementing smart cities, deployment of widespread wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has become a current hot topic. Among the application’s greatest challenges, there is still progress to be made concerning energy consumption and quality of service. Consequently, this project aims to explore a series of feasible solutions to improve the WSN energy efficiency for data aggregation by the WSN. This by strategically adjusting the position of the receiving base station and the packet rate of the WSN nodes. Additionally, the low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protocol is coupled with the WSN state of charge (SoC). For this thesis, a WSN was defined as a two dimensional area which contains sensor nodes and a mobile sink, i.e. a movable base station. Subsequent to the rigorous analyses of the WSN data clustering principles and system-wide dynamics, two different developing strategies, model-based and data-driven designs, were employed to develop two corresponding control approaches, model predictive control and reinforcement learning, on WSN energy management. To test their performance, a simulation environment was thus developed in Python, including the extended LEACH protocol. The amount of data transmitted by an energy unit is adopted as the index to estimate the control performance. The simulation results show that the model based controller was able to aggregate over 22% more bits than only using the LEACH protocol. Whilst the data driven controller had a worse performance than the LEACH network but showed potential for smaller sized WSNs containing a fewer amount of nodes. Nonetheless, the extension of the LEACH protocol did not give rise to obvious improvement on energy efficiency due to a wide range of differing results. / I samband med det ökande intresset för att implementera så kallade smart cities, har användningen av utbredda trådlösa sensor nätverk (WSN) blivit ett intresseområde. Bland applikationens största utmaningar, finns det fortfarande förbättringar med avseende på energiförbrukning och servicekvalité. Därmed så inriktar sig detta projekt på att utforska en mängd möjliga lösningar för att förbättra energieffektiviteten för dataaggregation inom WSN. Detta gjordes genom att strategiskt justera positionen av den mottagande basstationen samt paketfrekvensen för varje nod. Dessutom påbyggdes low-energy adaptive clustering hierarchy (LEACH) protokollet med WSN:ets laddningstillstånd. För detta examensarbete definierades ett WSN som ett två dimensionellt plan som innehåller sensor noder och en mobil basstation, d.v.s. en basstation som går att flytta. Efter rigorös analys av klustringsmetoder samt dynamiken av ett WSN, utvecklades två kontrollmetoder som bygger på olika kontrollstrategier. Dessa var en modelbaserad MPC kontroller och en datadriven reinforcement learning kontroller som implementerades för att förbättra energieffektiviteten i WSN. För att testa prestandan på dom två kontrollmetoderna, utvecklades en simulations platform baserat på Python, tillsamans med påbyggnaden av LEACH protokollet. Mängden data skickat per energienhet användes som index för att approximera kontrollprestandan. Simuleringsresultaten visar att den modellbaserade kontrollern kunde öka antalet skickade datapacket med 22% jämfört med när LEACH protokollet användes. Medans den datadrivna kontrollern hade en sämre prestanda jämfört med när enbart LEACH protokollet användes men den visade potential för WSN med en mindre storlek. Påbyggnaden av LEACH protokollet gav ingen tydlig ökning med avseende på energieffektiviteten p.g.a. en mängd avvikande resultat.

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Sedan industriella revolutionen har hastigheten av global uppvärmning och föroreningar i miljön ökat betydligt. Företag i fordonsindustrin arbetar aktivt för att göra sina produkter mer hållbara genom att bland annat minska utsläppen, minimera användningen av icke-förnybara resurser samt att återvinna. En batteridriven elbil (BEV) är en möjlig lösning för renare transport och marknaden har ökat signifikant. Men med den nuvarande batteriteknologin skulle stora byggmaskiner som grävmaskiner behöva tunga batterier för att möta sina energibehov, vilket ökar den totala vikten. Bränslecellshybriddrivna fordon (FCHEV) med vätgas är en potentiell lösning för medelstora och stora byggmaskiner som kombinerar bränsleceller och batterier för att tillhandahålla energin. Byggmaskiner har en växlande effekt och utför vanligtvis upprepande arbetsmönster, men en bränslecell reagerar långsammare på grund av den kemiska processen. Därför behövs ett effektivt energihanteringssystem för att möta effektbehovet, uppfylla systembegränsningar, minska vätgasförbrukningen samt att begränsa bränslecell- och batteridegraderingen. Syftet med denna avhandling är att utveckla en kontrollenhet och ett estimeringsinstrument för maskinbelastning för ett sådant FCHEV system. En ny energihanteringsstrategi föreslås genom att formulera den som ett optimeringsproblem och använda modellprediktiv reglering (MPC) för att minimera målfunktionen som involverar vätgasförbrukning och hastighetsbegränsningar. Kontrollenheten ger en optimal fördelning av bränslecell- och batterikraft över en tidsperiod som uppfyller det efterfrågade effektbehovet och följer systembegränsningarna. Maskinbelastningsestimeringen är baserad på autokorrelation och integreras med kontrollenheten. Estimeringsinstrumentet fungerar som en ingång till kontrollenheten som optimerar fördelningen av kraften mellan batteriet och bränslecellen. Jämfört med den tidigare realtidsfördelningsfunktionen för effekt som användes av Volvo Construction Equipment AB (Volvo CE) visade det sig att MPC kombinerat med autokorrelationsbaserad belastningsestimering främst använde ett mycket smalare fönster för batteriets laddningstillstånd (SoC), vilket öppnar upp möjligheten att minska batteristorleken i maskinen. Transienter i bränslecellens effekt minskar också, vilket minskar dess nedbrytning och förbättrar livslängden. / Ever since the industrial evolution, the rate of global warming and pollution in the environment have gone up significantly. Automotive companies are actively working towards making their products more sustainable in terms of reducing emissions, minimizing resource utilization of non-renewables, recycling, and several other steps. A pure battery electric vehicle (BEV) is a possible solution for cleaner transport and has seen widespread adoption among users. However, with the current battery technology, large construction machines such as excavators would need heavy batteries to meet their energy demand, pushing up the overall weight. Hydrogen driven Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicles (FCHEV) are a potential solution for medium and large sized construction machines having both fuel cells and batteries to supply energy. Construction machines have a highly transient power and generally perform repeating patterns of work but a fuel cell is slow reacting device due to the chemistry involved. Hence there is a need for an efficient energy management system to meet the power demand, satisfy system constraints, reduce hydrogen consumption and limit fuel cell and battery degradation. This thesis aims to develop a controller and a machine load predictor for such a FCHEV. A novel energy management strategy is proposed by formulating it as an optimization problem and using Model Predictive Control (MPC) to minimize the objective function that involves hydrogen consumption and rate constraints. The controller yields an optimal fuel cell and battery power split over a time-horizon that fulfills the demanded power and obeys the system constraints. An auto-correlation-based machine load predictor is integrated with the controller. The predictor serves as an input to the controller that optimizes the power split between the battery and fuel cell. Compared to the previous real-time power-split function used by Volvo Construction Equipment AB (Volvo CE), the MPC combined with the auto-correlation-based load predictor was found to primarily use a much narrower battery State of Charge (SoC) window, thus opening up the potential to reduce battery size in the machine. Transients in the fuel cell power are also reduced, thus slowing down its degradation and improving the lifetime.

In this research, an attempt is made to evaluate alternative model-predictive microgrid control approaches and to understand the trade-offs that emerge between model complexity and the ability to achieve real-time optimized system performance. Three alternative controllers are considered and their computational and optimization performance compared. In the first, nonlinearities of the generators are included within the optimization. Subsequently, an approach is considered wherein alternative (non-traditional) states and inputs of generators are used which enables one to leverage linear models with the model predictive control (MPC). Nonlinearities are represented outside the control in maps between MPC inputs and the physical inputs. Third, a recently proposed linearized trajectory (LTMPC) is considered. Finally, the performance of the controllers is examined utilizing alternative models of the synchronous machine that have been proposed for power system analysis.

abstract: Behavior-driven obesity has become one of the most challenging global epidemics since the 1990s, and is presently associated with the leading causes of death in the U.S. and worldwide, including diabetes, cardiovascular disease, strokes, and some forms of cancer. The use of system identification and control engineering principles in the design of novel and perpetually adaptive behavioral health interventions for promoting physical activity and healthy eating has been the central theme in many recent contributions. However, the absence of experimental studies specifically designed with the purpose of developing control-oriented behavioral models has restricted prior efforts in this domain to the use of hypothetical simulations to demonstrate the potential viability of these interventions. In this dissertation, the use of first-of-a-kind, real-life experimental results to develop dynamic, participant-validated behavioral models essential for the design and evaluation of optimized and adaptive behavioral interventions is examined. Following an intergenerational approach, the first part of this work aims to develop a dynamical systems model of intrauterine fetal growth with the prime goal of predicting infant birth weight, which has been associated with subsequent childhood and adult-onset obesity. The use of longitudinal input-output data from the “Healthy Mom Zone” intervention study has enabled the estimation and validation of this fetoplacental model. The second part establishes a set of data-driven behavioral models founded on Social Cognitive Theory (SCT). The “Just Walk” intervention experiment, developed at Arizona State University using system identification principles, has lent a unique opportunity to estimate and validate both black-box and semiphysical SCT models for predicting physical activity behavior. Further, this dissertation addresses some of the model estimation challenges arising from the limitations of “Just Walk”, including the need for developing nontraditional modeling approaches for short datasets, as well as delivers a new theoretical and algorithmic framework for structured state-space model estimation that can be used in a broader set of application domains. Finally, adaptive closed-loop intervention simulations of participant-validated SCT models from “Just Walk” are presented using a Hybrid Model Predictive Control (HMPC) control law. A simple HMPC controller reconfiguration strategy for designing both single- and multi-phase intervention designs is proposed. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Chemical Engineering 2021