Humans routinely confront the following key question which could be viewed as a probabilistic variant of the controllability problem: While faced with an uncertain environment governed by causal structures, how should they practice their autonomy by intervening on driver variables, in order to increase (or decrease) the probability of attaining their desired (or undesired) state for some target variable? In this paper, for the first time, the problem of probabilistic controllability in Causal Bayesian Networks (CBNs) is studied. More specifically, the aim of this paper is two-fold: (i) to introduce and formalize the problem of probabilistic structural controllability in CBNs, and (ii) to identify a sufficient set of driver variables for the purpose of probabilistic structural controllability of a generic CBN. We also elaborate on the nature of minimality the identified set of driver variables satisfies. In this context, the term "structural" signifies the condition wherein solely the structure of the CBN is known.
Authors in @cite_5 , drawing on the idea of SCT proposed by Lin @cite_6 , aim at identifying the minimal set of variables which are sufficient for the purpose of structural controllability of a generic large-scale LTI system. In a subsequent work, authors in @cite_4 , relax the objective of structural controllability of the system in whole, to merely that of a particular set of desired variables called target variables. This line of thought has been motivated due to the understanding that in large-scale systems, it may neither be attainable nor required to control the full system but, rather, to merely control a subset of the variables of the system (analogous to target variables in our problem) which are deemed pivotal for the realization of the task at hand. In this light, @cite_4 is concerned with the very same question underlying our work, yet, perusing it in radically different settings. In @cite_5 @cite_4 both variables and their inter-connections are deterministic in nature whereas, in our case, both have probabilistic natures; a point of departure which leads to a substantially different line of work---both semantically and syntactically.
@cite_5 @cite_4 @cite_6
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In this paper, we consider a robust network control problem. We consider linear unstable and uncertain discrete time plants with a network between the sensor and controller and the controller and plant. We investigate the effect of data drop out in the form of packet losses. Four distinct control schemes are explored and sufficient conditions to ensure almost sure stability of the closed loop system are derived for each of them in terms of minimum packet arrival rate and the maximum uncertainty. I. INTRODUCTION In the past decade, networked control systems (NCS) have gained much attention from both the control com- munity and the network and communication community. When compared with classical feedback control system, networked control systems have several advantages. For example, they can reduce the system wiring, make the system easy to operate and maintain and later diagnose in case of malfunctioning, and increase system agility (20). Although NCS have advantages, inserting a network in between the plant and the controller introduces many problems as well. For instance, zero-delayed sensing and actuation, perfect information and synchronization are no longer guaranteed in the new system architecture as only finite bandwidth is available and data packet drops and delays may occur due to network traffic conditions. These must be revisited and analyzed before networked control systems become prevalent. Recently, many researchers have spent effort on these issues and some significant results were obtained and many are in progress. Many of the aforementioned issues are studied separately. Tatikonda (19) and Sahai (13) have presented some interesting results in the area of control under communication constraints. Specifically, Tatikonda gave a necessary and sufficient condition on the channel data rate such that a noiseless LTI system in the closed loop is asymptotically stable. He also gave rate results for stabilizing a noisy LTI system over a digital channel. Sahai proposed the notion of anytime capacity to deal with real time estimation and control for a networked control system. In our paper (17), the authors have considered various rate issues under finite bandwidth, packet drops and finite controls. An optimal bit allocation scheme is given in (16) under the networked setting. The effect of pacekt drops on state estimation was studied by Sinopoli, et. al. in (3). It has further been investigated by many researchers including the present authors in (15) and (6). This paper builds upon the scalable admission control schemes for CDMA networks developed in F. (2003, December 2004). These schemes are based on an exact representation of the geometry of both the downlink and the uplink channels and ensure that the associated power allocation problems have solutions under constraints on the maximal power of each station user. These schemes are decentralized in that they can be implemented in such a way that each base station only has to consider the load brought by its own users to decide on admission. By load we mean here some function of the configuration of the users and of their bit rates that is described in the paper. When implemented in each base station, such schemes ensure the global feasibility of the power allocation even in a very large (infinite number of cells) network. The estimation of the capacity of large CDMA networks controlled by such schemes was made in these references. In certain cases, for example for a Poisson pattern of mobiles in an hexagonal network of base stations, this approach gives explicit formulas for the infeasibility probability, defined as the fraction of cells where the population of users cannot be entirely admitted by the base station. In the present paper we show that the notion of infeasibility probability is closely related to the notion of blocking probability, defined as the fraction of users that are rejected by the admission control policy in the long run, a notion of central practical importance within this setting. The relation between these two notions is not bound to our particular admission control schemes, but is of more general nature, and in a simplified scenario it can be identified with the well-known Erlang loss formula. We prove this relation using a general spatial birth-and-death process, where customer locations are represented by a spatial point process that evolves over time as users arrive or depart. This allows our model to include the exact representation of the geometry of inter-cell and intra-cell interferences, which play an essential role in the load indicators used in these cellular network admission control schemes. This paper addresses problems on the structural design of large-scale control systems. An efficient and unified framework is proposed to select the minimum number of manipulated measured variables to achieve structural controllability observability of the system, and to select the minimum number of feedback interconnections between measured and manipulated variables such that the closed-loop system has no structural fixed modes. Global solutions are computed using polynomial complexity algorithms in the number of the state variables of the system. Finally, graph-theoretic characterizations are proposed, which allow a characterization of all possible solutions. The thesis describes a new method for obtaining minimizers for optimal control problems whose minima serve as control policies for guiding nonlinear dynamical systems to achieve prescribed goals under imposed trajectory and actuator constraints. One of the major contributions of the present work resides in the approximation of such minimizers by piecewise polynomial functions expressed in terms of a linear combination of non-uniform rational B-spline (NURBS) basis functions and the judicious exploitation of the properties of the resulting NURBS curves to improve the computational effort often associated with solving optimal control problems for constrained dynamical systems. In particular, by exploiting the two structures combined in a NURBS curve, NURBS basis functions and an associated union of overlapping polytopes constructed from the coefficients of the linear combination, we are able to separate an optimal control problem into two subproblems | guidance and obstacle avoidance, making the original problem tractable. This is accomplished by laying out the union of overlapping polytopes in such a way that they delineate a section of space that avoids all obstacles and then manipulating the NURBS basis functions to obtain trajectories that are guaranteed to remain bounded by this section of space without explicitly including the conjunction of disjunctions naturally induced from obstacles into the guidance problem. In addition, we show how one can construct systematically a feasible region that corresponds to a NURBS parameterization starting from an ordered union of pairwise adjacently overlapping nonempty compact convex sets. Specifically, we show how to setup a nonlinear programming problem to solve for the feasible region in terms of an ordered union of pairwise adjacently overlapping polytopes with nonempty interiors by maximizing the sum of their volumes and starting from a feasible region described by an ordered union of pairwise adjacently overlapping nonempty convex compact simi-algebraic sets. Finally, we show how this strategy can be implemented practically for an autonomous system traversing an urban environment. Finally, this work culminated in the filing of patent US20070179685 on behalf of Northrop Grumman for the Space Technology sector and in the development of the NURBS-based OTG software package. This C++ package contains the theoretical results of this thesis in the form of an object-oriented implementation optimized for real-time trajectory generation.