Engineering and Technology Applications of Control Co-Design: A Survey

Control-inspired design, as the name suggests, involves drawing inspiration from control theory to design other engineering systems. Engineers may use the principles of feedback control to design systems that can adapt and self-correct in response to changing conditions. This technique is known as Control Co-design (CCD), and it focuses on the redesign of dynamics and subsystem interactions. CCD offers several benefits, such as improved performance, reduced design time and cost, and increased reliability, and has been applied to a variety of areas. In this paper, we present a review of 197 articles related to CCD and highlight the main topics of its applications, such as renewable energy, vehicular and aircraft control systems and communication systems in control. We delimit the applications of CCD in the field of engineering, providing an introductory understanding of this topic and presenting the main works developed in this field in recent years, as well as discussing the tendencies and benefits of CCD. The paper offers an in-depth conceptualisation of CCD. A theoretical example is provided to illustrate CCD’s application in a Hybrid Wind-Wave Platform (HWWP), detailing the interaction between aerodynamic and hydrodynamic design domains and their control challenges, along with discussions on simultaneous and nested CCD formulations.