Publikationen

We investigate optimal control of linear port-Hamiltonian systems with control constraints, in which one aims to perform a state transition with minimal energy supply. Decomposing the state space into dissipative and non-dissipative (i.e. conservative) subspaces, we show that the set of reachable states is bounded w.r.t. the dissipative subspace. We prove that the optimal control problem exhibits the turnpike property with respect to the non-dissipative subspace, i.e., for varying initial conditions and time horizons optimal state trajectories evolve close to the conservative subspace most of the time. We analyze the corresponding steady-state optimization problem and prove that all optimal steady states lie in the non-dissipative subspace. We conclude this paper by illustrating these results by a numerical example from mechanics.

This article presents a distributed optimization algorithm tailored to solve optimization problems arising in smart grids. In detail, we propose a variant of the augmented Lagrangian-based alternating direction inexact Newton (ALADIN) method, which comes along with global convergence guarantees for the considered class of linear-quadratic optimization problems. We establish local quadratic convergence of the proposed scheme and elaborate its advantages compared with the alternating direction method of multipliers (ADMM). In particular, we show that, at the cost of more communication, ALADIN requires fewer iterations to achieve the desired accuracy. Furthermore, it is numerically demonstrated that the number of iterations is independent of the number of subsystems. The effectiveness of the proposed scheme is illustrated by running both an ALADIN and an ADMM-based model predictive controller on a benchmark case study.

We analyze the sensitivity of the extremal equations that arise from the first order necessary optimality conditions of nonlinear optimal control problems with respect to perturbations of the dynamics and of the initial data. To this end, we present an abstract implicit function approach with scaled spaces. We will apply this abstract approach to problems governed by semilinear PDEs. In that context, we prove an exponential turnpike result and show that perturbations of the extremal equation's dynamics, e.g., discretization errors decay exponentially in time. The latter can be used for very efficient discretization schemes in a Model Predictive Controller, where only a part of the solution needs to be computed accurately. We showcase the theoretical results by means of two examples with a nonlinear heat equation on a two-dimensional domain.

We exploit an adaptive control technique, namely funnel control, to establish both initial and recursive feasibility in Model Predictive Control (MPC) for output-constrained nonlinear systems. Moreover, we show that the resulting feedback controller outperforms the funnel controller both w.r.t. the required sampling rate for a zero-order-hold implementation and required control action. We further propose a combination of funnel control and MPC, exploiting the performance guarantees of the model-free funnel controller during a learning phase and the advantages of the model-based MPC scheme thereafter.