Integrated Dynamic System Design Through the Dimensions of Plant, Control, and System Architecture

ABSTRACT: Using fully integrated design methods is a challenging endeavor for dynamic engineering systems. Many critical design decisions can be broadly characterized as either architecture, plant, or control decisions. In this talk, we will discuss recent developments in solving some of these combined design problems. First, we will discuss some recent advances in the rapidly growing field of control co-design, which seeks to develop the plant and control system in an integrated fashion. There is a clear, strong coupling between how the control system can perform and a given physical design that we typically have design authority over. We will discuss the general methodology from a systems-level perspective and present some recent work on the numerical optimal control methods and problem formulation that have shown substantial improvement over the state-of-the-art for specific control co-design problems. Second, the architecture dimension will be discussed with applications to aircraft thermal management systems and vehicle suspension design. Graph-theoretic approaches and enumeration techniques have been developed and linked to physics-based models for dynamic system evaluation and control. Systematic decision support is desperately needed in this space as new system design challenges motivate broader explorations of the system architecture dimension.

BIO: Dr. Daniel Herber is an Assistant Professor in the Systems Engineering Department at Colorado State University. Dr. Herber studied at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, earning his B.S. in General Engineering in 2011 and his M.S. and Ph.D. in Systems and Entrepreneurial Engineering in 2014 and 2017, respectively. He held a postdoctoral position (2018-2019) with the NSF Engineering Research Center for Power Optimization for Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS). His research interests reach through the areas of design optimization, model-based system engineering, system architecture synthesis, combined physical and control system design (control co-design), and numerical methods for optimal control concentrated around the development of novel theory and tools for integrated design methods for dynamic systems. Applications of his work have included energy, aerospace, electrical, mechanical, and thermal systems.