Alleyne featured presenter at Indian Control Conference

3/5/2019

Written by

CSL's  Andrew Alleyne was one of four plenary speakers at the fifth annual 2019 Indian Control Conference in January at IIT Delhi.

Alleyne’s featured presentation, “Control of Complex Energy and Power Systems for Electrified Mobility,” focused on the electrification of mobility and transport as a global megatrend that has been underway for decades. His abstract reads, “The mobility sector encompasses cars, trucks, busses and aircraft. The systems exhibit complex interactions of multiple modes of power flow. These modes can be thermal, fluid, electrical, or mechanical. A key challenge in working across various modes of power flow is the widely varying time scales of the subsystems which makes centralized control efforts challenging. This talk will present a particular distributed controller architecture for managing the flow of power based on on-line optimization. A hierarchical approach allows for systems operating on different time scales to be coordinated in a controllable manner. It also allows for different dynamic decision making tools to be used at different levels of the hierarchy based on the needs of the physical systems under control. Additional advantages include the modularity and scalability inherent in the hierarchy. Additional modules can be added or removed without changing the basic approach. In addition to the hierarchical control, a particularly useful graph-based approach will be introduced for the purpose of modeling the system interactions and performing early stage design optimization. The graph approach, like the hierarchy, has benefits of modularity and scalability along with being an efficient framework for representing systems of different time scales. The graph allows design optimization tools to be implemented and optimize the physical system design for the purpose of control. Recent results will be presented representing both generic interconnected complex systems as well as specific examples from the aerospace and automotive application domains.”

Alleyne speaking at the conference
Alleyne speaking at the conference

The Indian Control Conference is organized by IIT Delhi in collaboration with the Control Society.

Alleyne is the Ralph and Catherine Fisher Professor in MechSE and is the principal investigator of the #18.5M NSF Engineering Research Center for Power Optimization of Electro-Thermal Systems (POETS), which is tackling the thermal and electrical challenges surrounding mobile electronics and vehicle design as a single system. He was recently named the 2018 recipient of the Control Engineering Practice Award from the American Automatic Control Council (AACC), the highest “practitioner” award given to U.S. researchers in the controls field.  


Share this story

This story was published March 5, 2019.