Covering all aspects of this important topic, this work presents a review of the main control issues in wind power generation, offering a unified picture of the issues surrounding its optimal control. Discussion is focused on a global dynamic optimization approach to wind power systems using a set of optimization criteria which comply with a comprehensive group of requirements including: energy conversion efficiency; mechanical reliability; and quality of the energy provided.

This fascinating new work comes complete with more than 100 illustrations and a detailed practical prototype. It explores the domains encountered when designing a distributed embedded computer control system as an integrated whole. Basic issues about real-time systems and their properties, especially safety, are examined first. Then, system and hardware architectures are dealt with, along with programming issues, embodying desired properties, basic language subsets, object orientation and language support for hardware and software specifications.

Applications of precision engineering, generally defined as manufacturing to tolerances that are better than one part in 10⁵, abound and can be found in various semiconductor processes (e.g., lithography, wafer probing, inspection), co-ordinate measuring machines, precision metrology systems (e.g., scanning probe microscopy), and robot/machine tools to carry out micro-assembly (e.g., micro-electro-mechanical systems) and delicate short-wavelength laser processes.

Precision Motion Control (second edition) focuses on enabling technologies for precision engineering...

Process Control introduces an emerging area in process control - control system analysis and design based on the concept of passive systems. Passive systems are a class of processes that dissipate certain types of physical or virtual energy, defined by Lyapunov-like functions. Passivity and associated stability conditions form one of the cornerstones in control theory and have recently begun to be applied in process control. Defined as an input-output property, the concept of passivity implies stability conditions for interconnected systems. Passive systems are minimum...

Hybrid supervisory systems integrate and exchange information between discrete- and continuous-data-based controllers and subsystems. Application areas include process, manufacturing and service industries, healthcare, telecommunication, transportation and logistics, among others.

From the hardware point of view, the rapid progress of information-processing power and its commercial availability has made possible the development of complex supervisory systems. Many barriers that restrained the evolution of supervisory systems in the past have been removed by the recent popularisation...

Advanced Control of Industrial Processes presents the concepts and algorithms of advanced industrial process control and on-line optimisation within the framework of a multilayer structure. Relatively simple unconstrained nonlinear fuzzy control algorithms and linear predictive control laws are covered, as are more involved constrained and nonlinear model predictive control (MPC) algorithms and on-line set-point optimisation techniques.

The major topics and key features are:

- Development and discussion of a multilayer control structure with interrelated direct...

Process Control Performance Assessment is a practical guide to the application of control benchmarking to real, complex, industrial processes. It presents commercial solutions as well as current and future techniques still under development and contains real full-scale-implementation industrial case studies from the oil and gas, power and chemical industries providing a hierarchical perspective on benchmarks. The effect of benchmarking and control tuning on process performance and revenue optimisation is demonstrated.

The most frequently occurring practical issues...