A multi-objective optimisation-based software environment for control systems design

Multi-objective optimisation is a proven, well-known parameter tuning technique in control design. It is especially suited to solve complex, multi-disciplinary design problems. This paper describes a software environment, called MOPS (Multi-Objective Parameter Synthesis), which supports the control engineer in setting up his design problem as a properly formulated multi-objective optimisation task. To this end, MOPS offers a basic control system criteria library, a generic multi-model structure for multi-disciplinary problems and a generic multi-case structure for robust control law design, as well as visualisation tools for monitoring the design progress. Several additional features for dealing with a large amount of parameters and criteria, distributed computation for time consuming computations and the use of external simulation and analysis servers are also provided. MOPS also supports parameter estimation in identification problems and optimisation based design assessment for robustness. The user is provided with a clear application program interface and a graphical user interface both implemented in MATLAB. To solve the underlying optimisation problem different powerful optimisation procedures are available.