Optimal control of combined chemo-radiation therapy treatments for improving cancer care

Combined chemo-radiation treatments are often used to enhance tumor cell kill, with respect to their separate treatments. Currently, chemo-radiation therapy treatments are prescribed as a separately optimized radiotherapy treatment with the addition of a generic chemotherapy regimen. The dosing of the combined therapies is mostly based on...

Fast Dynamic Programming: A Numerical Method for Solving Dynamic Programming Problems

A well-established method for finding the optimal control policy for a given dynamical system is to solve the problem iteratively going from its terminal state "backwards" in time, known as Dynamic Programming Algorithm. For a generic problem with discrete state/action space, the algorithm has computational complexity of <i>O(NM)</i> for <i>N</i...

Longitudinal Control for Autonomous Vehicles: A comparison between Reinforcement Learning and Optimal Control

In the automotive industry automation is popular and every year car OEMs advance their technology to be able to drive autonomously. Longitudinal control of the vehicles is an important part of the complete autonomous driving system. The difficulty of this control problem lies with changing longitudinal dynamics and the lack of full-state system...

Modelling and Optimization of Tilt-Rotor Aircraft Flight Trajectories

Tilt-rotor aircraft combine the helicopter’s benefit of VTOL capability and the flight performance that turboprops possess on range, speed and endurance. Tilt-rotor aircraft have the potential to decrease airport congestion and average flight delay in passenger transportation, while benefits are numerous in i.e. search and rescue, disaster...

Wing Optimization with Active Load Control: Integrating Maneuver Load Control and Gust Load Alleviation in Wing Structural Optimization of Large Transport Aircraft

Improving the performance of large transport aircraft requires high aspect ratio and lightweight wings, making aeroelasticity an important factor in wing structural design. Active control of aeroelastic loads can be used to improve the aeroelastic behavior of the wing.<br/><br/>Two active load control techniques are considered: Maneuver Load...

Inclusion of noise-related constraints in departure procedure optimization

The ever-increasing use of aircraft, together with the on-going urbanization causes increasing noise nuisance due to aviation. This is attenuated by the positioning of airports close to densely populated areas. For this reason the majority of the large airports in the world indicate that noise is one of the limiting factors in the expansion of...

Contrail Mitigation by means of 4D Aircraft Trajectory Optimisation

Aviation has a significant impact on the global atmosphere. Next to particle and gas emissions, the increase of cloud cover might increasingly contribute to aviation induced climate change. Water contained in the exhaust of jet engines locally raises the relative humidity levels sufficiently for contrail formation to occur. These contrails can...

Optimal Control for Race Car Minimum Time Maneuvering

Minimizing the time needed to travel a prescribed distance is the main development goal in motorsports. In racing car development, simulations are used to predict the effect of design parameter changes on vehicle performance. If approached as an optimal trajectory planning problem, a maneuver simulation can be used to determine not only the...

Real-time receding horizon trajectory generation for long heavy vehicle combinations on highways

The so-called A-double long heavy vehicle combination is a 32 meter long and up to 80 tonnes heavy double-trailer truck widely used in Canada and Australia today, and will be more abundant on the road also in Europe in the near future. They have the potential to decrease road transport cost, traffic congestion and generate lower emissions than...

Nonlinear Model Order Reduction using POD/DEIM for Optimal Control of Burgers' Equation

The model-order reduction techniques Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) and Discrete Empirical Interpolation Method (DEIM) have been applied for the optimal control of Burgers' equation. Accuracy and performance of the reduced models have been studied in detail for different values of the viscosity parameter and different sizes of the...

Rijtijdspeling in treindienstregelingen: Energiezuinig rijden versus robuustheid

Commissioned by the Dutch Railways Operation (NS Reizigers) research has been conducted on the possibilities to better incorporate energy-efficient train operation into the timetable. The motivation for this research is based on the fact that energy-efficient operation is not yet optimally included in the timetable design. This is because of the...

An optimal control approach for estimating aircraft command margins

This dissertation presents an optimal control framework to determine a collection of open-loop command signals, that mathematically guarantees operation of a dynamical system within prescribed state constraints. The framework is applied to estimate real-time command margins for aircraft control systems so that, safe operation within the flight...

A generic approach to a rout guidance strategy

The thesis presents a generic methodology able to generate optimal controlled dynamic prescriptive route guidance to be disseminated by means of variable message signs (VMS). The methodology is generic in the sense it can be used on any network topology, with any number of VMS's, for different scenario's (e.g. recurrent congestion or accidents),...