control theory

control theory
Field of applied mathematics relevant to the control of certain physical processes and systems.

It became a field in its own right in the late 1950s and early '60s. After World War II, problems arising in engineering and economics were recognized as variants of problems in differential equations and in the calculus of variations, though they were not covered by existing theories. Special modifications of classical techniques and theories were devised to solve individual problems, until it was recognized that these seemingly diverse problems all had the same mathematical structure, and control theory emerged. See also control system.

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Introduction

      field of applied mathematics that is relevant to the control of certain physical processes and systems. Although control theory has deep connections with classical areas of mathematics, such as the calculus of variations and the theory of differential equations (differential equation), it did not become a field in its own right until the late 1950s and early 1960s. At that time, problems arising in engineering and economics were recognized as variants of problems in differential equations and in the calculus of variations, though they were not covered by existing theories. At first, special modifications of classical techniques and theories were devised to solve individual problems. It was then recognized that these seemingly diverse problems all had the same mathematical structure, and control theory emerged.

      As long as human culture has existed, control has meant some kind of power over the environment. For example, cuneiform fragments suggest that the control of irrigation systems in Mesopotamia was a well-developed art at least by the 20th century BC. There were some ingenious control devices in the Greco-Roman culture, the details of which have been preserved. Methods for the automatic operation of windmills go back at least to the European Middle Ages. Large-scale implementation of the idea of control, however, was impossible without a high level of technological sophistication, and the principles of modern control started evolving only in the 19th century, concurrently with the Industrial Revolution. A serious scientific study of this field began only after World War II.

      Although control is sometimes equated with the notion of feedback control (which involves the transmission and return of information)—an isolated engineering invention, not a scientific discipline—modern usage favours a wider meaning for the term. For instance, control theory would include the control and regulation of machines, muscular coordination and metabolism in biological organisms, and design of prosthetic devices, as well as broad aspects of coordinated activity in the social sphere such as optimization of business operations, control of economic activity by government policies, and even control of political decisions by democratic processes. If physics is the science of understanding the physical environment, then control theory may be viewed as the science of modifying that environment, in the physical, biological, or even social sense.

      Much more than even physics, control is a mathematically oriented science. Control principles are always expressed in mathematical form and are potentially applicable to any concrete situation. At the same time, it must be emphasized that success in the use of the abstract principles of control depends in roughly equal measure on basic scientific knowledge in the specific field of application, be it engineering, physics, astronomy, biology, medicine, econometrics, or any of the social sciences.

Examples of modern control systems
      To clarify the critical distinction between control principles and their embodiment in a real machine or system, the following common examples of control may be helpful.

Machines that cannot function without (feedback) control
      Many basic devices must be manufactured in such a way that their behaviour can be modified by means of some external control. Generally, the same effect cannot be brought about (in practice and sometimes even in theory) by any intrinsic modification of the characteristics of the device. For example, transistor amplifiers introduce intolerable distortion in sound systems when used alone, but properly modified by a feedback control system they can achieve any desired degree of fidelity. Another example involves powered flight. Early pioneers failed, not because of their ignorance of the laws of aerodynamics but because they did not realize the need for control and were unaware of the basic principles of stabilizing an inherently unstable device by means of control. Jet aircraft cannot be operated without automatic control to aid the pilot, and control is equally critical for helicopters. The accuracy of inertial navigation equipment cannot be improved indefinitely because of basic mechanical limitations, but these limitations can be reduced by several orders of magnitude by computer-directed statistical filtering, which is a variant of feedback control.

Control of machines
      In many cases, the operation of a machine to perform a task can be directed by a human (manual control), but it may be much more convenient to connect the machine directly to the measuring instrument (automatic control); e.g., a thermostat may be used to turn on or off a refrigerator, oven, air-conditioning unit, or heating system. The dimming of automobile headlights, the setting of the diaphragm of a camera, and the correct exposure for colour prints may be accomplished automatically by connecting a photocell directly to the machine in question. Related examples are the remote control of position (servomechanisms) and speed control of motors (governors). It is emphasized that in such cases a machine could function by itself, but a more useful system is obtained by letting the measuring device communicate with the machine in either a feedforward or feedback fashion.

Control of large systems
      More advanced and more critical applications of control concern large and complex systems the very existence of which depends on coordinated operation using numerous individual control devices (usually directed by a computer). The launch of a spaceship, the 24-hour operation of a power plant, oil refinery, or chemical factory, and air traffic control near a large airport are examples. An essential aspect of these systems is that human participation in the control task, although theoretically possible, would be wholly impractical; it is the feasibility of applying automatic control that has given birth to these systems.

Biocontrol
      The advancement of technology (artificial biology) and the deeper understanding of the processes of biology (natural technology) has given reason to hope that the two can be combined; man-made devices should be substituted for some natural functions. Examples are the artificial heart or kidney, nerve-controlled prosthetics, and control of brain functions by external electrical stimuli. Although definitely no longer in the science-fiction stage, progress in solving such problems has been slow not only because of the need for highly advanced technology but also because of the lack of fundamental knowledge about the details of control principles employed in the biological world.

Robots (robot)
      On the most advanced level, the task of control science is the creation of robots. This is a collective term for devices exhibiting animal-like purposeful behaviour under the general command of (but without direct help from) humans. Highly specialized industrial manufacturing robots are already common, but real breakthroughs will require fundamental scientific advances with regard to problems related to pattern recognition and thought processes. (See artificial intelligence.)

Principles of control
      The scientific formulation of a control problem must be based on two kinds of information: (A) the behaviour of the system must be described in a mathematically precise way; (B) the purpose of control (criterion) and the environment (disturbances) must be specified, again in a mathematically precise way.

      Information of type A means that the effect of any potential control action applied to the system is precisely known under all possible environmental circumstances. The choice of one or a few appropriate control actions, among the many possibilities that may be available, is then based on information of type B. This choice is called optimization.

      The task of control theory is to study the mathematical quantification of these two basic problems and then to deduce applied mathematical methods whereby a concrete answer to optimization can be obtained. Control theory does not deal directly with physical reality but with mathematical models (mathematical model). Thus, the limitations of the theory depend only on the agreement between available models and the actual behaviour of the system to be controlled. Similar comments can be made about the mathematical representation of the criteria and disturbances.

      Once the appropriate control action has been deduced by mathematical methods from the information mentioned above, the implementation of control becomes a technological task, which is best treated under the various specialized fields of engineering. The detailed manner in which a chemical plant is controlled may be quite different from that of an automobile factory, but the essential principles will be the same. Hence further discussion of the solution of the control problem will be limited here to the mathematical level.

      To obtain a solution in this sense, it is convenient to describe the system to be controlled, which is called the plant, in terms of its internal dynamical state. By this is meant a list of numbers (called the state vector) that expresses in quantitative form the effect of all external influences on the plant before the present moment, so that the future evolution of the plant can be exactly given from the knowledge of the present state and the future inputs. This situation implies that the control action at a given time can be specified as some function of the state at that time. Such a function of the state, which determines the control action that is to be taken at any instant, is called a control law. This is a more general concept than the earlier idea of feedback; in fact, a control law can incorporate both the feedback and feedforward methods of control.

      In developing models to represent the control problem, it is unrealistic to assume that every component of the state vector can be measured exactly and instantaneously. Consequently, in most cases the control problem has to be broadened to include the further problem of state determination, which may be viewed as the central task in statistical prediction and filtering theory. In principle, any control problem can be solved in two steps: (1) building an optimal filter (a so-called Kalman filter) to determine the best estimate of the present state vector; (2) determining an optimal control law and mechanizing it by substituting into it the estimate of the state vector obtained in step 1.

      In practice, the two steps are implemented by a single unit of hardware, called the controller, which may be viewed as a special-purpose computer. The theoretical formulation given here can be shown to include all other previous methods as a special case; the only difference is in the engineering details of the controller.

      The mathematical solution of a control problem may not always exist. The determination of rigorous existence conditions, beginning in the late 1950s, has had an important effect on the evolution of modern control, equally from the theoretical and the applied point of view. Most important is controllability; it expresses the fact that some kind of control is possible. If this condition is satisfied, methods of optimization can pick out the right kind of control using information of type B.

      The controllability condition is of great practical and philosophical importance. Because the state-vector equations accurately represent most physical systems, which only have small deviations about their steady-state behaviour, it follows that in the natural world small-scale control is almost always possible, at least in principle. This fact of nature is the theoretical basis of practically all the presently existing control technology. On the other hand, little is known about the ultimate limitations of control when the models in question are not linear, in which case small changes in input can result in large deviations. In particular, it is not known under what conditions control is possible in the large, that is, for arbitrary deviations from existing conditions. This lack of scientific knowledge should be kept in mind in assessing often-exaggerated claims by economists and sociologists in regard to a possible improvement in human society by governmental control.

Rudolf E. Kalman

Additional Reading
Otto Mayr, The Origins of Feedback Control (1970; originally published in German, 1969), offers a historical overview of feedback devices. Leslie M. Hocking, Optimal Control (1991), gives an accessible introduction, including various applications.

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Universalium. 2010.

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