Linear control of nonlinear systems based on nonlinearity measures

In reality, virtually every process is a nonlinear system. Nevertheless, linear controller design methods have proved to be adequate in many applications. In practice, the linear controller design is usually done disregarding a possible nonlinear plant/linear model mismatch. In this work we introduce a general framework for the development of linear controllers for nonlinear systems based on nonlinearity measures. Nonlinearity measures are tools to assess the extent of a system’s inherent nonlinearity instead of just recognizing a system as being linear or nonlinear. Recent work shows that nonlinearity measures characterize the magnitude of the modeling error when an optimal linear model is used for the nonlinear system. The best linear model can then be used to design a linear controller that robustly stabilizes the linear system in presence of the nonlinear modeling error. A crucial point is that both, the best linear model and the modeling error, are determined for a specified region of operation, thus significantly increasing the class of applicable nonlinear systems. Examples demonstrate the (necessity and) effectiveness of the proposed approach.