7th Workshop on Control of Distributed Parameter Systems
July 18th-22th 2011, Wuppertal, Germany
Organisers: Birgit Jacob (Wuppertal) and Roland Schnaubelt (Karlsruhe)
Distributed parameter
systems (DPS) is an established area of research
in control which can trace its roots back to the sixties. While the
general aims are the same as for lumped parameter systems, to
adequately describe the distributed nature of the system one needs to
use partial differential equation (PDE) models. The modelling issue is
in itself nontrivial, especially when there is boundary control action
and sensing on the boundary. Controllability and observability
concepts are subtle and investigating these for a single PDE example
leads to a sophisticated mathematical problem. The action of
controlling the system introduces feedback into the PDE model which
results in a more complicated mathematical model; the resulting
closed-loop system may not be well-posed and this issue has only quite
recently become well understood. At this stage, the mathematical
machinery for formulating the basic control problems is available
(although not so well known), and this has led to a wealth of new
system theoretic results for DPS.