A “plug-n-play” computationally efficient approach for control design of large-scale nonlinear systems using co-simulation

Recently, there has been a growing interest towards simulation-based control design (co-simulation), where the controller utilizes an optimizer to minimize or maximize an objective function (system performance) whose evaluation involves simulation of the system to be controlled. However, existing simulation-based approaches are not able to handle in a computationally efficient way large-scale optimization problems involving hundreds or thousands of states and parameters. In this paper, we propose and analyze a new simulation-based control design approach, employing an adaptive optimization algorithm capable of efficiently handle large-scale control problems. The convergence properties of the proposed algorithm are established. Simulation results exhibit efficiency of the proposed approach when applied to large-scale problems. The simulation results employ two large-scale real-life systems for which conventional popular optimization techniques totally fail to provide an efficient simulation-based control design.