Half-day Workshop: Computation for Real World Control Systems
Organizer: Daniel Y. Abramovitch [Agilent Technologies]

Computation is an essential component of implementing any real-world control system, but the details of how to make this work are often either left to the individual contributors to figure out or handed off to turn key vendors.  This workshop intends to provide insights, methods, and concrete examples into three major pieces of this subject.  First, the workshop will present recent tutorial material (ACC 2023) from the author on real-time computing issues for control systems. This material explains the principal factors affecting the four computing chains inside a feedback system.  After this overview, the workshop will spend time on an often-neglected area of computation for control system measurements, whether they be used in the control loop operation or in the system identification used in model building for control.  Finally, the workshop will hone in on specific programming methods and components in the controller itself, describing efficient implementation methods and structures. Together these three thrusts should equip the participant with tools that they can apply almost immediately in their work.

Full-day Workshop: Modeling, Estimation, and Control for Battery Safety
Organizers: Yejin Moon [University of Maryland], Hosam K. Fathy [University of Maryland]

This workshop aims to share research progress in modeling and control strategies for battery safety. This is a timely topic that has been gaining attention as battery adoption, particularly for sustainability, increases in domains such as transportation and stationary storage. Battery safety has been persistently important as a research topic for quite some time, with multiple decades’ worth of examples of catastrophic battery failures affecting larger engineered systems. Moreover, the importance of battery safety research is growing due to multiple trends that can trigger unsafe operation, including growing battery power/energy density and growing consumer demand for faster charge/discharge rates. Ensuring battery safety involves addressing multiple intertwined challenges such as aging, temperature rise, and the risk of thermal runaway. Motivated by this issue, extensive research has been conducted to model battery hazard dynamics, estimate battery hazard states, detect faults, and control temperature. Featuring multiple speakers, the workshop will highlight the critical importance of battery safety and present a range of innovative approaches and diverse perspectives for addressing these issues. The proposed workshop builds on a long tradition of excellent battery systems-related workshops at conferences including MECC, but the focus of the workshop on safety is both novel and forward-looking.