SOS for Nonlinear Systems Analysis

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• Antonis Papachristodoulou, University of Oxford
• Wednesday 07 February 2018, 14:00-15:00
• 1109B (CAP seminar room) .

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Giordano Scarciotti.

Abstract Many problems in robust and nonlinear control can be formulated using polynomial positivity conditions: the simplest example is the search of polynomial Lyapunov functions for stability analysis of equilibria of dynamical systems with polynomial vector fields. The discovery that semidefinite programming can be used to test polynomial non-negativity, through a sum of squares relaxation, opens up new directions in nonlinear systems analysis and design. In this talk I will first present how ideas from dynamical systems, positive polynomials and convex optimization can be used to analyse the stability, robust stability, performance and robust performance of systems described by nonlinear ODEs. Although entirely algorithmic, this approach does not scale well to large system instances, and I will discuss how the problem structure can be taken into account to allow better scalability. Examples from the analysis of PDEs arising in fluid mechanics as well as the analysis of power system models will be presented.

Biography Antonis Papachristodoulou joined the University of Oxford in 2006, where he is currently Professor of Engineering Science and a Tutorial Fellow in Worcester College, Oxford. Since 2015, he is EPSRC Fellow and Director of the EPSRC & BBSRC Centre for Doctoral training in Synthetic Biology. He obtained an MA/MEng degree in Electrical and Information Sciences from the University of Cambridge, U.K., as a member of Robinson College in 2000. In 2005 he completed a PhD in Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology, with a PhD Minor in Aeronautics. His thesis was on “Scalable Analysis of Nonlinear Systems Using Convex Optimization”. In 2005 he held a short David Crighton Fellowship at the University of Cambridge and a postdoctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology. In 2015 he was awarded the European Control Award for his contributions to robustness analysis and applications to networked control systems and systems biology and the O. Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award. He serves regularly on Technical Programme Committees for conferences, and he is associate editor for Automatica and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

This talk is part of the Control and Power Seminars series.

This talk is included in these lists:

• 1109B (CAP seminar room)
• Andrea Picciau's list
• Control and Power Seminars

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