CAREER: Set-Based Dynamic Modeling and Control for Trustworthy Energy Management Systems

This Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) award supports research that enables safe operation of complex energy management systems through advances in modeling and control, thereby promoting the progress of science, advancing prosperity and welfare, and securing the national defense. New set-based dynamic modeling and control frameworks will be developed to account for the complex and uncertain behaviors of thermal management systems to make them trustworthy and reliable in safety-critical applications. To support the electrification of power systems, thermal management systems have become highly-integrated safety-critical elements of these complex energy systems. However, the lack of modeling and control techniques capable of safely maximizing the capability of thermal management systems makes them a bottleneck and liability within the overall system. This project will solve this challenge and achieve trustworthy thermal management systems operations via set-based techniques to capture uncertainty and bound worst-case behaviors, systematic allocation of risk to account for structured and unstructured sources of uncertainty, and verification of interpretable and analyzable closed-loop controllers under all possible system operations. The modeling, control, analysis, and verification techniques in this project are cross-cutting and applicable to other safety-critical dynamic systems with nonlinear and hybrid dynamics. Through close integration of research and education, this project will train multi-disciplined engineers in the intersection of thermal energy management, dynamic systems modeling, and advanced control to meet the increasingly critical workforce demand for thermal controls engineers. This will be achieved through hands-on project-based learning at the undergraduate and graduate levels and undergraduate research opportunities designed to provide multi-disciplinary engineering education and broaden participation of underrepresented groups. This research aims to make fundamental contributions to the design and analysis of scalable, high-performance, and provably safe controllers for complex energy management systems. It will achieve this goal by developing set-based modeling and control techniques for thermal management systems, which provide the potentially transformative paradigm needed to make these systems trustworthy. This research will create frameworks for set-based modeling and control with rigorous formulations and guarantees to achieve trustworthy thermal management systems operation, integrate systematic risk management in closed-loop decision making to balance performance and safety in highly uncertain operational environments, and extract interpretable and analyzable control laws from optimization-based control formulations for dependable real-time system operation. The novel hybrid zonotope set representation provides the enabling and unifying capability to represent and bound the hybrid and nonlinear dynamics associated with thermal management systems and the control laws designed to optimize their operation. This research will be evaluated through application to thermal management systems modeling and control for high-performance aircraft in a hardware-in-the-loop implementation. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.