Contents Course description Course material you receive via ordinary mail How to work with the lessons Lessons to download Where to send the assignments How to register References Course description Graph theory provides the means to tackle problems in completely diverse fields like combinatorial mathematics, computer science, optimisation, network and communication engineering and recently control and neural networks. Although it has long been suggested that graph theory may be used for control systems analysis and design there are probably no courses at graduate and postgraduate level to teach control theory based on the graph approach. This course aims to teach the participants the use of graph theory to automatic control. The objectives are to introduce basic concepts of graph theory related to control, to teach the use of graph theory for control systems analysis, and to teach the use of graph theory for control systems design. The course is for graduate and PhD students engaged in control, applied mathematicians interested in control, and professional control engineers.
Students currently attend the course free of charge.
A prerequisite is that you have taken a course in automatic control with strong emphasis on state-space methods. It is then up to you and your own university to arrange for a credit transfer. The graph theoretic approach is an attempt to overcome some of the disadvantages of the state-space method. By mapping the state-space equations of the system to a graph gives the designer additional insight. The internal structure of the system together with the structural nature of many system properties is revealed by the system graph and modifications to the system structure may be proposed in case desired system properties do not hold.