Applying evolutionary programming to robust control systems design and analysis

An evolutionary programming (EP) approach to designing robust controllers for parametric uncertain systems has been developed. The approach is expedited through the use of an overbounding interval plant representation of the original plant. The design of a robust controller is transformed into solving an eigenvalue optimization problem, which involves optimizing the maximum real part of eigenvalues of the characteristic polynomial for the uncertain plant. Several examples including a practical flywheel-shaft-flywheel system are presented to show that the proposed approach can achieve the global or near-global optimal solutions by performing the evolutionary operations, which is crucial to designing robust controllers and determining the stability of uncertain control systems.