Qualitative Analysis of Distributed Physical Systems with Applications to Control Synthesis

Manyimportant physical phenomena,such as temperature distribution, air flow, and acoustic waves,are describedas continuous,distributed parameterfields. Analyzingandcontrolling these physical processesand systemsare commontasks in manyscientific and engineering domains.However,the challenges are multifold: distributed fields are conceptuallyharderto reason about than lumpedparameter models; computational methodsare prohibitively expensivefor complex spatial domains;the underlyingphysicsimposessevere constraints onobservabilityandcontrollability. er develops an ontological abstraction and a structure-based design mechanism,in a framework collectively knownas spatial aggregation (SA), for reasoning about and synthesizing distributed control schemesfor physical fields. Theontological abstraction modelsa physical field as a hierarchyof networks of spatial objects. SAapplies a smallnumberof generic operators to a field to computeconcise structural descriptions suchas iso-contours, gradientt...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 1998
• Where: AAAI
• Authors: Christopher Bailey-Kellogg, Feng Zhao
• Keywords: AAAI 1998, Intelligent Agents, Manyimportant Physical Phenomena, Physical Fields, Such