Cell mapping for controller design and evaluation

Cell mapping is a powerful computational technique for analyzing the global behaviour of nonlinear dynamical systems. It simplifies the task of analyzing a continuous phase space by partitioning it into a finite number of disjoint cells and approximating system trajectories as cell transitions. The resulting cell map provides global measures of stability and other performance characteristics that are valuable in system analysis and controller design. This article shows how cell mapping can be used to design high-performance, conventional and fuzzy, controllers. It also shows how cell maps can provide global performance measures of the designed controllers, including time optimality, controllability, and empirical assessments of robustness. Evaluating controller performance based on these global measures is superior to simply examining time domain responses for various initial conditions.