Necmiye Ozay receives Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems paper prize

Prof. Necmiye Ozay received the Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems Paper Prize for the paper Finite abstractions with robustness margins for temporal logic-based control synthesis, co-authored by Prof. Jun Liu (U. of Waterloo).

This Prize is awarded for outstanding contributions to the field of hybrid systems documented in a paper published in the journal Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems. The prize is awarded to the authors of two selected papers published in the journal in the three years preceding the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) World Congress.

The paper introduces a notion of finite abstractions that can be used to synthesize robust controllers for dynamical systems from temporal logic specifications. These finite abstractions, equipped with certain robustness margins, provide a unified approach to various issues commonly encountered in implementing control systems.

The authors demonstrated that it is possible to synthesize provably-correct robust feedback controllers that can handle various types of imperfections in the models or measurements.

One example of an imperfection is an implementation imperfection. “For example,” explained Ozay, “when an embedded controller computes a control decision, the computation time might vary from one step to another, a problem referred to as jitter. Most control design techniques ignore these variations and assume ideal uniform sampling. The new robust control synthesis algorithms can guarantee correct execution even in the existence of such variations.”