Fundamentals of sliding-mode controller design

Abstract

The main purpose of control engineering is to steer the regulated plant in such a way that it operates in a required manner. The desirable performance of the plant should be obtained despite the unpredictable influence of the environment on all parts of the control system, including the plant itself, and no matter if the system designer knows precisely all the parameters of the plant. Even though parameters may change with time, load, and external circumstances, still, the system should preserve its nominal properties and ensure the required behavior of the plant. In other words, the principal objective of control engineering is to design control (or regulation) systems which are robust with respect to external disturbances and modeling uncertainty. This objective may be very well achieved using the sliding-mode technique [6, 11, 16, 18, 26, 28, 31, 43, 45, 55, 62, 66, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87], which is extensively used throughout this monograph. To be more precise, in the monograph, we focus our attention on the application of discrete sliding-mode control principles to the congestion elimination in data transmission networks. However, in order to make the text self-contained, we begin this chapter with presenting the main notions and concepts used in the field of variable structure systems and sliding-mode control.