Since the end of the seventies, several authors proposed to use a distributed delay in the control law of time-delay systems. Some recent publications showed that the implementation of such laws is not always safe with respect to the stability of the closed-loop system, as we recall in the first part of this paper limited to the scalar case of systems with delayed input. In the second part, we ...

I extend Myerson’s (1981) ironing technique to more general objective functions. The approach can be used to solve quasilinear principalagent models in the general case where the monotonicity constraint implied by incentive compatibility may be binding at the optimum. It is based on calculating for each type of the agent a score that takes into account virtual surplus (i.e., aggregate surplus a...

This paper is devoted to the robust stabilization and passivity of general uncertain nonlinear systems. It is first proved that the unforced system has a unique local solution with any initial value in some neighborhood of the origin. Some properties of robust passive systems are obtained. Based on these properties, it is verified that under some conditions robust passivity of the uncertain sys...

In the ice cream industry, the type of final desired product (large cartons (sqrounds) or ice creams on a stick) determine the viscosity at which the ice cream has to be produced. One of the objectives of the ice cream crystallization processes is therefore to produce an ice cream of specified viscosity. In this paper, a nonlinear control strategy is proposed for the control of the viscosity of...

One of the main open problems in the area of adaptive control of linear-in-the-parameters feedback linearizable systems is the computation of the feedback control law when the identification model becomes uncontrollable. In this paper, the authors propose a switching adaptive control strategy that overcomes this problem. The proposed strategy is applied to nth-order feedback linearizable system...

Studies of inflation targeting make the distinction between strict and flexible inflation targeting. The problem of strict inflation targeting has so far been analysed by treating it as a special case of a standard optimal control problem and the algorithms used have not provided an exact solution. This paper presents a formal solution to the problem of strict inflation targeting in a economy w...

This paper presents the control of non-regular or singular nonlinear systems applying non-linear predictive controllers. The systems treated here have the relative degree not well defined thus feedback linearization is not applicable due to singularities in the input-output linearizing control law. An alternative controller capable of dealing with non-regular systems is the NCGPC (Nonlinear Con...

Abstract: According to the goal of the Conference in Bedlewo, dedicated to the 50-th anniversary of Optimal Control theory, and considering that the 2008 year marked the centennial birthday of Lev Semenovich Pontryagin, I decided to devote my talk to a brief account on the discovery of the maximum principle and to an analysis of its basic feature, the Hamiltonian format.

We consider a stochastic control model driven by a fractional Brownian motion. This model is a formal approximation to a queueing network with an ON–OFF input process. We study stochastic control problems associated with the long-run average cost, the infinite-horizondiscounted cost, and thefinite-horizon cost. In addition, wefind a solution to a constrained minimization problem as an applicati...

The theory of fundamental design limitations is well understood for the case that the performance variable is measured for feedback. In the present paper, we extend the theory to systems for which the performance variable is not measured. We consider only the special case for which the performance and measured outputs and the control and exogenous inputs are all scalar signals. The results of t...