This project is co-funded by the EEA Grants and the state budget of the Slovak Republic from the EEA Scholarship Programme Slovakia.

Grant scheme: Program EHP Slovakia – Mobility projects among universities – EEA/EHP-SK06-II-01

Project ID: SK06-II-01-004

Duration: 2.6.2015 - 30.9.2016

Partners

• Slovak University of Technology in Bratislava: UAMT FEI STU (prof. Huba coordinator), UAMAI SjF STU (prof. Rohaľ-Iľkiv), UIAM FCHPT STU (prof. Fikar), DBS SvF STU (doc. Rabenseifer)
• Norwegian University of Science and Technology Trondheim (prof. Skogestad, prof. Johansen, prof. Hovd)
• Universität Liechtenstein, Liechtenstein (prof. Droege)

Anotation

The aim of the project is to support international mobility of students, PhD students, and staff members of four participating faculties of STU in Bratislava with partners from NTNU Trondheim and Universität Liechtenstein. It will initiate academic cooperation between the University of Liechtenstein and STU Bratislava in construction, architecture, and space planning, focusing on the use of alternative energy sources in operation of buildings, including computer-aided simulations of energy needs and internal environment, and spatial planning of rural settlements as well. The project also contributes to further strengthening of already existing cooperation between NTNU Trondheim and faculties of STU in Bratislava in the field of advanced methods of automatic control and to progress of inter-faculty cooperation at STU in Bratislava.

Aims of the project for FCHPT STU

The project continues in preceding cooperation of three faculties STU (FCFT, FME, and FEEIT) with NTNU Trondheim in the field of automatic control realised within the framework of the project NIL-I-007-d that resulted in international impact (e.g. citations of resulting study materials and proceedings). This already existing cooperation within mobility project will be further expanded with focus on advanced methods of automatic control and their transition to educational process and to preparation of graduates in all three study stages for industrial praxis.

Overall, the mobility process will contribute to training of graduates with outstanding knowledge and abilities needed for work in international teams and for increased competitiveness of our education, research, development, and industry in the global framework.

Sarmad Munir: 17.6.2015 - 17.7.2015, STU

I learnt basics of MPT Toolbox. I got familiarized with properties of polyhedron i.e. the construction of polyhedron with help of hyperplane (H-), Vertex (V-) representation and lower and upper bounds. I was able to work with polyhedron with equality and inequality constraints. I came to know about checking of Empty set, bounded and dimensional properties of a polyhedron.

I also learnt about designing and construction of a MPC Controller and Explicit MPC Controller. I was able to construct MPC Controller for a given LTI system with specific state and input constraints and state and input penalty functions. Explicit MPC was developed with the help of MPT Toolbox. I learnt about plotting and accessing partitions of Explicit MPC and I was successful in evaluation of a control law for such MPC.

I implemented different algorithms mentioned in Predictive Control for Linear and Hybrid Systems, F. Borrelli, A. Bemporad, M. Morari, for finding the region of current state for explicit MPC. Sequential search and maximum value algorithms were implemented along with the algorithm with descriptor function and their efficincies were measured by noting down the time elapsed during computations.

Miroslav Fikar: 9-13.11.2015, NTNU

Outcomes of the stay:

• Lecture: Modelling, control, and optimisation of batch membrane processes
• Discussions with colleagues about their current research directions
• Supervision of PhD student D. Pakšiová staying at NTNU
• Discussions with prof. S. Skogestad and Dr. Jaeschke on self-optimising control
• Work on joint paper on membrane contactor processes
• Discussions with prof. T. A. Johansen on PhD training TEMPO (joint training project financed by EU)

Daniela Pakšiová: 3.9-19.12.2015, NTNU

The stay was focused on modeling and simulation of the CO2 removal process using membrane contactors. A model was developed to describe the CO2 removal process where two membrane contactors are used first to absorb carbon dioxide from the gas mixture and then to desorb it. The work consisted of literature review, modeling of membrane contactor for absorption process, modeling of two membrane contactors with absorption and desorption processes to remove carbon dioxide from the gas mixture, and testing and determination of the performance using simulations. A manuscript of a joint paper for the SSKI 2016 international conference was prepared. The model developed in this project will be subject to further work where the process will be optimized in order to achieve a better performance with maximum amount of CO2 being purified.

During the stay I also attented weekly meetings and seminars with the research group members, who gave me their support and also useful feedback for my work.

Morten Hovd: 25.1.2016 29.1.2016, STU

• Lectures on controller design using LMI and SOS techniques: SOS techniques are an extension of LMI techniques, with better capacity for accounting for system nonlinearity. The aim is to make it easier for PhD students (when relevant) to take up SOS techniques in their research.
• Consultations with PhD students.
• Cross-fertilization of research ideas, insight into ongoing research at STUBA.
• Discussions with faculty members on common research interests.

Parisa Ahmadi Moshkenani: 10.1.2016 10.3.2016, STU

• Discussing possible future works and starting to work on some of them, studying mixed-integer linear programming as usefull method in optimization problems and its role in modifying the combinatorial approach towards multi-parametric quadratic programming and explicit MPC.
• Studying the concepts of different types of degeneracies and their effect on the combination of optimal active constraints in the multi-parametric quadratic programming from a combinatorial point of view, in order to modify the exploration strategy of the combinatorial tree such that the computational time and complexity decrease in the offline part of the solution.
• Studying the possible methods towards partial combinatorial approach, one suggested way is to denote the constraints that appear in the greater areas in the feasible domain as the most importants one and some how get rid of those constraints that contribute in the combinations of optimal sets in small parts of the feasible domain.

Filip Janeček: 2.7.2016 7.7.2016, NTNU

• Presentation of MPC for autonomous vehicles with collision avoidance, solved by Mixed-Integer Quadratic Programming, reduction of computational time by using Quadratic Programming and time varying constraints.
• Discussion with PhD students and teachers about results and possible ideas for further research.
• Presentation of the toolbox for Matlab for solving collision avoidance problems and simulate the results.
• Visit of Department of Engineering Cybernetics and learn about methods of solving collision avoidance prolems.