Robust Control of Time-delay Systems

Recently, there have been significant developments in robust control of time-delay systems. This volume presents a systematic treatment of robust control for such systems in the frequency domain. The emphasis is on systems with a single input or output delay, although the delay-free part of the plant can be multi-input-multi-output, in which case the delays in different channels should be the same.

The author covers the whole range of H-infinity control of time-delay systems: from controller parameterization implementation; from the Nehari problem to the four-block problem; from theoretical developments to practical issues. The major tools used are similarity transformation, the chain-scattering approach and J-spectral factorization.

Self-contained, "Robust Control of Time-delay Systems" will interest control theorists and mathematicians working with time-delay systems. Its methodical approach will be of value to graduates studying general robust control theory or its applications in time-delay systems.

Controller design.- Classical Control of Time-delay Systems.- Preliminaries.- J-spectral Factorisation of Regular Para-Hermitian Transfer Matrices.- The Delay-type Nehari Problem.- An Extended Nehari Problem.- The Standard H? Problem.- A Transformed Standard H? Problem.- 2DOF Controller Parameterisation.- Unified Smith Predictor.- Controller Implementation.- Discrete-delay Implementation of Distributed Delay in Control Laws.- Rational Implementation Inspired by the ?-operator.- Rational Implementation Based on the Bilinear Transformation.

Qing-Chang Zhong obtained PhD degrees from Shanghai Jiao Tong University and from Imperial College London. He has been working in the area of time-delay systems for eight years and in the area of systems and control for more than 14 years. He served as a member of the International Program Committee of the 5th IFAC (International Federation of Automatic Control) Workshop on Time-Delay Systems held in Leuven, Belgium in September 2004 and as a member of the Technical Program Committee of the 7th Asia-Pacific Conference on Complex Systems held in Cairns, Australia in December 2004. He will organize the 7^th IFAC Workshop on Time-Delay Systems in the UK in 2007. He is currently on the International Editorial Board of the Journal of the Institute of Chinese Engineers. The EPSRC has recently awarded Doctor Zhong a £120,000 grant to further my research in time-delay systems. He is a senior member of the IEEE.

Doctor Zhong has an excellent record of publication on this subject in the most important international journals in systems and control, such as IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control (5 papers), Automatica (3) and IEE Proc. Control Theory Appl. (3) etc. He has made major contributions to study of time-delay systems (as attested by the reviewers of this proposal).