A bilinear matrix inequality approach to robust nonlinear process control

While linear robust control theory is relatively well understood with many standard techniques for control system analysis and controller design, methods for designing robust nonlinear controllers are relatively undeveloped. This constitutes a significant gap between control theory and practice, as most real processes have significant nonlinearities associated with their startup and shutdown, and often during normal operations. Hence, the development of robust nonlinear controller design methods is widely recognized as one of the most important and challenging open fundamental problems in process control theory. Here, a rigorous approach is developed for designing robust nonlinear controllers using a combination of dynamic nonlinearity inversion and bilinear matrix inequalities