Large-scale rigorous actuator and sensor selection

Control system performance depends on the actuators and sensors used in the closed loop. Selection of these devices based on an exhaustive candidate-by-candidate test is a combinatorial problem. The selection considered is based on a per candidate test, but using an efficient feasibility test combined with a search strategy that, under certain conditions, is polynomial in some measures of the problem size, large-scale problems can be tackled in acceptable time. An application with 28 input/output devices to choose from, making ≈266·10 ⁶ unique combinations possible, shows the approach to be feasible. Only 270 or 658 candidate combinations were tested for feasibility, to completely determine all combinations of sensors and actuators that were guaranteed to reach a specified level of robust performance. This is almost 10⁶ times less than an exhaustive search would require