Springer Reconfigurable Distributed Control

This informative monograph helps meet the challenge of applying distributed control to dynamical systems. It shows readers how to bring the best parts of various control paradigms to bear in making distributed control more flexible and responsive. From the Back Cover Distributed control systems offer the advantages of control local to the process being controlled while retaining the ease of control at a single centralised location. Typically such a system has involved a great deal of hard-wiring and has been of most use only in situations where flexibility is not essential. Now, however, distributed control systems are being applied more often in process control, autonomous systems and safety-critical systems where control needs to change to cope with fault appearance or other (possibly intentional) process disturbance. Reconfigurable Distributed Control helps meet the challenge of applying distributed control to dynamical systems, integrating different approaches to the problem. It presents an holistic view based on the appropriate use of stochastic, formal and robust control paradigms. The use of smart peripheral elements means that the degree of effort required for the reconfiguration of a networked control system can now be reduced, particular emphasis being placed on the reduction of time delays. Case studies are employed to demonstrate the real applications of the theory. While being of most interest to academic researchers and graduate students grappling with the problem of making distributed control systems more responsive to changes in process and plant, Reconfigurable Distributed Control will also be informative for readers with a background in more general distributed computing. About the Author Doctor García-Nocetti is a very experienced control engineer with a high profile in the international control community. He is a member of IFACs International Program Committee and has been active in the organisation of many symposia and congresses especially in his speciality are of real-time control. Doctor García-Nocetti is also a previous Springer author having written the Advances in Industrial Control monograph: Parallel Processing in Digital Control (3-540-19728-1) with Professor Peter Fleming in 1992. The area of distributed control is becoming more and more important as its flexibility increases and new wireless technologies become available for its implementation. Doctor García-Nocetti’s long-standing interest in parallel and distributed systems make him the ideal author for such a monograph.