Control of Multilevel Power Converters using Formal Methods

High-power converters based on elementary switching cells are more and more used in the industry of power electronics owing to various advantages such as lower voltage stress and reduced power loss. However, the complexity of controlling such converters is a major challenge that the power manufacturing industry has to face with. The synthesis of industrial switching controllers relies today on heuristic rules and empiric simulation. There is no formal guarantee of correctness in zones around nominal values. It is therefore interesting to apply formal methods to guarantee the good behavior of the systems within predefined zones of variations for the input parameters. As far as we know, such formal methods have been applied only to small electronic power devices (like DC-DC boost converters) containing one switching cell. We show in this paper that one can apply formal methods to more complicated systems, such as multi-level converters containing several pairs of switching cells.