In recent years, the analysis and synthesis of networked control systems (NCSs) have received increasing attention from both scientific and industrial communities. Compared with traditional point-to-point control systems, the main advantages of NCSs come from their low cost, their flexibility and easy re-configurability, their natural reliability and robustness to failure, and their adaptation capability. Consequently, NCSs have been finding applications in a broad range of areas such as power grids, water distribution networks, transportation networks, haptics collaboration over the Internet, mobile sensor networks, and so on. However, the introduction of communication channels in the control loop also brings some network-induced critical issues or constraints such as variable transmission delays, data packet dropouts, packet disorder, quantization errors, etc., which would significantly degrade the system performance or even destabilize the system in certain conditions. This talk will first introduce some elegant approaches to network-based control and estimation problems. Then, a novel two-layer network-based architecture for operational control of industrial processes will be discussed. It will be shown that under the proposed framework, the overall optimal operational control of networked industrial processes can be achieved.

Biography

Huijun Gao received his Ph.D. degree in control science and engineering from Harbin Institute of Technology, China, in 2005. He was a Research Associate with the Department of Mechanical Engineering, The University of Hong Kong, from November 2003 to August 2004. From October 2005 to October 2007, he carried out his postdoctoral research with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Alberta, Canada. Since November 2004, he has been with Harbin Institute of Technology, where he is currently a Professor and director of the Research Institute of Intelligent Control and Systems. Prof. Gao’s research interests include network-based control, robust control/filtering theory and their engineering applications. He is an IEEE Fellow and received the IES David Irwin Early Career Award. He is Co-Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Industrial Electronics and Associate Editor of Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Transactions on Cybernetics, IEEE/ASME Transactions on Mechatronics etc. Prof. Gao is an IEEE Industrial Electronics Society (IES) Administration Committee (AdCom) member. He is a Thomson Reuters Highly Cited Researcher and was listed among the top 17 scholars in “The World’s Most Influential Scientific Minds” by Thomson Reuters, 2014.