Wolfram Research Announces - Control Systems Professional
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg5739] Wolfram Research Announces - Control Systems Professional
- From: Scott Brew <sbrew>
- Date: Sat, 11 Jan 1997 14:29:24 -0500
- Organization: Wolfram Research
- Sender: owner-wri-mathgroup at wolfram.com
CONTROL SYSTEM PROFESSIONAL The First Comprehensive Environment with Integrated Symbolic Capability Symbolic control algorithms are now available as a part of Control System Professional, the newest addition to the Mathematica Applications Library. The software package uses a unified object-oriented approach to integrate the arbitrary-precision, machine-precision, symbolic, and graphical operations commonly performed in the control and systems areas, and covers all the steps from creating and manipulating symbolic models to analysis, design, and simulation of control systems. The package is oriented toward practitioners in the field as well as researchers. It is also a complete tool for educators and students studying topics ranging from the beginning to the advanced level. Written for an interdisciplinary audience, the package is readily applicable to a wide range of problems in the mechanical, electrical, chemical, and aerospace industries, as well as other fields including biochemistry and economics. With Control System Professional, the user gains access to a library of more than 150 functions and options that are designed to solve the typical control problems. To make the package easy to use, the same functions handle the state-space and transfer-function representations of SISO or MIMO dynamic systems, defined in either the continuous-time or discrete-time domains. Internally, the systems are represented by data structures that allow the user to pass all system information from one function to another simply by referencing the system by name--the package automatically chooses appropriate algorithms. Experts, on the other hand, may easily access all the intermediate steps. Supporting both the "classical" and "modern" approaches, Control System Professional finds the transfer-function matrices in the expanded and factored polynomial forms and computes the state-space realizations from the input-output forms or state equations. A collection of interconnecting functions is supplied to build arbitrary complex systems from simple ones. Numerous algorithms are provided to find the discrete-time approximations of the analog systems and the continuous-time models of the sampled system. The package handles systems with time delays and supports several linearization methods for nonlinear systems, including Pade and minimax approximations. Control System Professional's model operations include computing the minimal realizations and finding the Jordan and Kalman canonical forms, as well as selecting controllable and observable subspaces. The package also finds the internally balanced realizations and performs the corresponding model reductions. Controllability and observability properties are determined either in a transparent fashion or by computing and analyzing the controllability and observability matrices and Gramians. A similarity transform function enables conversion between equivalent realizations. The user also has access to the continuous and discrete matrix Lyapunov equation solvers. Drawing on Mathematica's computational engine, Control System Professional allows the user to obtain the time-domain responses analytically or to simulate them numerically. Impulse, step, ramp, or arbitrary response functions are obtainable with the same ease. The package generates the Bode, Nyquist, Nichols, and singular-value plots for the frequency domain representations as well as the root-locus plots and animations. The feedback design tools are represented by the robust and Ackermann's algorithms for the eigenvalue assignment problem and the linear-quadratic optimal control design tools for the infinite-horizon state and output regulator problems. Special functions are provided to compute the Kalman estimator and filter, the discrete equivalents to the continuous regulator and estimator, and the solutions to the continuous and discrete algebraic Riccati equations. The package comes with a 186-page manual that describes its functions and provides hundreds of examples that make the package immediately useful for practical applications. The case studies are presented for the inverted pendulum and magnetic ball levitation systems, the production and inventory control model, the depth control of a submarine, the lateral dynamics of an aircraft, the roll attitude control of a missile, the concentration control of a chemical mixture in a mixing tank, as well as the PID controller, the minimum-time response controller, and others. Also included is comprehensive on-line help. Control System Professional is available for all platforms that run Mathematica 2.2 or later. These include Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, Linux, SunOS, Solaris, OSF/1, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, NEXTSTEP, OS/2, and OpenVMS. For more information, send email to info at wolfram.com or phone 800-441-6284. The CSP home page is at http://www.wolfram.com/applications/control. Examples from the manual are freely downloadable from http://www.wolfram.com/cgi-bin/MathSource/Applications/Engineering/Control/0208-347. CSP is an open platform for implementing control algorithms. If you are working on methods that can make a useful extension to the package, we would be happy to help. Please contact us at control-developer at wolfram.com.