Section: Overall Objectives

Overall Objectives

CORIDA is a team labeled by INRIA, by CNRS and by University Henri Poincaré, via the Institut Élie Cartan of Nancy (UMR 7502 CNRS-INRIA-UHP-INPL-University of Nancy 2). The main focus of our research is the robust control of systems governed by partial differential equations (called pde 's in the sequel). A special attention is devoted to systems with a hybrid dynamics such as the fluid-structure interactions. The equations modeling these systems couple either partial differential equations of different types or finite dimensional systems and infinite dimensional systems. We mainly consider inputs acting on the boundary or which are localized in a subset of the domain.

Infinite dimensional systems theory is motivated by the fact that a large number of mathematical models in applied sciences are given by evolution partial differential equations. Typical examples are the transport, heat or wave equations, which are used as mathematical models in a large number of problems in physics, chemistry, biology or finance. In all these cases the corresponding state space is infinite dimensional. The understanding of these systems from the point of view of control theory is an important scientific issue which has received a considerable attention during the last decades. Let us mention here that a basic question like the study of the controllability of infinite dimensional linear systems requires sophisticated techniques such as non harmonic analysis (cf. Russell [82] ), multiplier methods (cf. Lions [78] ) or micro-local analysis techniques (cf. Bardos–Lebeau–Rauch [71] ). Like in the case of finite dimensional systems, the study of controllability should be only the starting point of the study of important and more practical issues like feedback optimal control or robust control. It turns out that most of these questions are open in the case of infinite dimensional systems. Consequently, our aim is to develop tools for the robust control of infinite dimensional systems. More precisely, given an infinite dimensional system one should be able to answer two basic questions:

1. Study the existence of a feedback operator with robustness properties.

2. Find an algorithm allowing the approximate computation of this feedback operator.

The answer to question 1 above requires the study of infinite dimensional Riccati operators and it is a difficult theoretical question. The answer to question 2 depends on the sense of the word “approximate”. In our meaning “approximate” means “convergence”, i.e., that we look for approximate feedback operators converging to the exact one when the discretization step tends to zero. From the practical point of view this means that our control laws should give good results if we use a large number of state variables. This fact is no longer a practical limitation of such an approach, at least in some important applications where powerful computers are now available. We intend to develop a methodology applicable to a large class of applications.