The development of Spin-Transfer Torque Magnetic RAMs (STT-MRAMs) mass production requires high-quality test solutions. Accurate and appropriate fault modeling is crucial for the realization of such solutions. This paper targets fault modeling and test generation for all interconnect and contact defects in STT-MRAMs and shows that using the defect injection and circuit simulation for fault modeling without incorporating the impact of magnetic coupling will result in an incomplete set of fault models; hence, not obtaining accurate fault models. Magnetic coupling introduced by the stray field is an inherent property of STT-MRAMs and may foster the occurrence of additional memory faults. Not considering the magnetic coupling clearly will give rise to test escapes. The paper introduces a compact model for STT-MRAM that incorporates the intra- and inter-cell stray field, uses this model to derive the full set of fault models for interconnect and contact defects, and finally proposes an efficient test solution.

This article investigates the stability of continuous-time switched linear systems with dwell-time constraints. A fresh insight into this established problem is provided via novel stability conditions that require the solution to a family of differential Lyapunov equations and algebraic Lyapunov equations. The proposed analysis, which leads to a peculiar Lyapunov function that is decreasing in between and at switching instants, enjoys the following properties: it achieves the same dwell time as the well-known result in the research 'stability and stabilization of continuous time switched linear systems' by Geromel and Colaneri; it removes the increasing computational complexity of the linear interpolation method; it leads to a straightforward counterpart for discrete-time switched linear systems.We show the application of this methodology to the problem of adaptive control of switched linear systems with parametric uncertainties.

In the presence of discontinuous time-varying delays, neither Krasovskii nor Razumikhin techniques can be successfully applied to adaptive stabilization of uncertain switched time-delay systems. This paper develops a new adaptive control scheme for switched time-delay systems that can handle impulsive behavior in both states and time-varying delays. At the core of the proposed scheme is a Lyapunov function with a dynamically time-varying coefficient, which allows the Lyapunov function to be non-increasing at the switching instants. The control scheme, guaranteeing global uniformly ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop system, substantially enlarges the class of uncertain switched systems for which the adaptive stabilization problem can be solved. A two-tank system is used to illustrate the effectiveness of the method.

This paper establishes an adaptive tracking approach for linear systems with parametric uncertainties, when input measurements are quantized due to the presence of a communication network closing the control loop. In order to address the tracking problem, a novel dynamic quantizer with dynamic offset is introduced and embedded into an adaptive hybrid control strategy based on zooming mechanism. A Lyapunov-based approach is used to derive the adaptive adjustments for the control gains and for the dynamic range and dynamic offset of the quantizer: it is proven analytically that the proposed adjustments guarantee asymptotic state tracking. Quantized adaptive control of an electrohydraulic system is given as an example of the effectiveness of the designed control methodology.

This paper studies model reference adaptive control for switched linear systems with large parametric uncertainties. An aggregate leakage approach is proposed to develop a novel adaptive law, which overcomes the state-of-the-art assumption of knowing the upper and lower bounds of the parameter uncertainty. In addition, a switching law is developed based on mode-dependent average dwell time scheme, which exploits the information of the known reference model for every subsystem, i.e., average dwell time is realized in a subsystem sense. Based on the proposed time-constraint scheme, switching signals that are less conservative than those based on dwell time and average dwell time can be designed. Global uniform ultimate boundedness of the closed-loop adaptive switched system is guaranteed. Furthermore, the tracking error is shown to be upper bounded and also an ultimate bound is presented. Simulations using NASA GTM aircraft illustrate the proposed method.

This letter introduces a new switched adaptive control mechanism that can cope with parametric uncertainty while using discrete and saturated actuators. Control of air handling units (AHUs), where air and water supply have discrete and saturated characteristics, is the motivational drive behind this letter. We show that the cheap actuation and low computational requirements of building automation installations can be met after recasting the AHU thermal dynamics as a switched linear system with discrete working modes. Adaptive laws with anti-windup compensation and a switching law based on dwell time are introduced to cope with the uncertainties and input constraints of the switched linear system. Tracking performance is shown analytically and demonstrated via a numerical test case.

This paper addresses robust adaptive stabilization of uncertain switched time-delay systems with unknown disturbances in a high-order form. In addition to parametric uncertainty, an extra source of uncertainty arises from having time-varying delays. In particular, the upper bound of the changing rate of the delay is assumed to be unknown. To this purpose, a new reparametrization method is proposed, which incorporates both sources of uncertainty in a single scalar parameter. Therefore, a single scalar adaptive law is designed for parametric uncertainties and time-varying delays, which is combined with a new dynamic gain embedded in the control action. The new dynamic gain is designed to dominate the nonlinear effects caused by both the parametric uncertainty and the unknown variation of the time delay. The proposed design guarantees global asymptotic stability for arbitrary switching. A numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of the method.

This work presents a distributed model reference adaptive methodology for output synchronization of heterogeneous linear agents with unknown dynamics. We consider a setting in which the control input is communicated among neighbors, instead of observer variables. For those agents that can access the signals of the reference model, classical model reference adaptation laws lead to leader synchronization; for those agents that cannot access such signals, synchronization must be achieved by taking the neighboring agents as an alternative reference model. We show that these two groups of agents give rise to two types of matching conditions: the standard conditions to match the reference model, and new distributed matching conditions among neighboring agents. Since all matching gains are unknown, the gains are adapted online via Lyapunov-based estimation. Asymptotic synchronization is proven analytically, and numerical examples show the effectiveness of the approach.

In this paper, a novel Lyapunov function is proposed to study switched linear systems with a switching delay between activation of system modes and activation of candidate controller modes. The novelty consists in continuity of the Lyapunov function at the switching instants and discontinuity when the system modes and controller modes are matched. This structure is exploited to construct a time-varying Lyapunov function that is non-increasing at time instants of discontinuity. Stability criteria based on the novel Lyapunov function are developed to guarantee global asymptotic stability in the noiseless case. Most importantly, when exogenous disturbances are considered, the proposed Lyapunov function can be used to guarantee a finite non-weighted L₂ gain for asynchronously switched systems, for which Lyapunov functions proposed in literature are inconclusive. A numerical example illustrates the effectiveness of the proposed method.

This paper addresses the problem of asymptotic tracking for switched linear systems with parametric uncertainties and dwell-time switching, when input measurements are quantized due to the presence of a communication network closing the control loop. The problem is solved via a dynamic quantizer with dynamic offset that, embedded in a model reference adaptive control framework, allows the design of the adaptive adjustments for the control parameters and for the dynamic range and dynamic offset of the quantizer. The overall design is carried out via a Lyapunov-based zooming procedure, whose main feature is overcoming the need for zooming out at every switching instant, in order to compensate for the possible increment of the Lyapunov function at the switching instants. It is proven analytically that the resulting adjustments guarantee asymptotic state tracking. The proposed quantized adaptive control is applied to the piecewise linear model of the NASA Generic Transport Model aircraft linearized at multiple operating points.

Despite the progresses in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC), a crucial limitation of the state-of-the-art of this control scheme is that the string stability of the platoon can be proven only when the vehicles in the platoon have identical driveline dynamics (homogeneous platoons). In this paper, we present a novel control strategy that overcomes the homogeneity assumption and that is able to adapt its action and achieve string stability even with uncertain heterogeneous platoons with unknown engine performance losses and inevitable communication losses. Considering a one-vehicle look-ahead topology, we propose an adaptive switched control strategy: the control objective is to switch from an augmented CACC to an augmented Adaptive Cruise Control strategy when communication is lost based on a dwell time characterized switching law. The simulation of the proposed control strategy is conducted to validate the theoretical analysis.

The advances in distributed inter-vehicle communication networks have stimulated a fruitful line of research in Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control (CACC). In CACC, individual vehicles, grouped into platoons, must automatically adjust their own speed using on-board sensors and communication with the preceding vehicle so as to maintain a safe inter-vehicle distance. However, a crucial limitation of CACC is that the string stability of the platoon can be proven only when the vehicles have identical driveline dynamics and perfect engine performance (homogeneous platoon), and possibly an ideal communication channel. This work proposes a novel CACC strategy that overcomes the homogeneity assumption and that is able to adapt its action and achieve string stability even for uncertain heterogeneous platoons. Moreover, in order to handle the inevitable communication losses, we formulate an extended average dwell-time framework and an adaptive switched control strategy which activates an augmented CACC or an augmented Adaptive Cruise Control strategy depending on communication reliability. Stability is proven analytically and simulations are conducted to validate the theoretical analysis.

In this paper, adaptive tracking control of switched nonlinear systems in the parametric strict-feedback form is investigated. After defining a reparametrisation lemma in the presence of a non-zero reference signal, we propose a new adaptive backstepping design of the virtual controllers that can handle the extra terms arising from the reparametrisation (and that the state-of-the-art backstepping designs cannot dominate). The proposed adaptive design guarantees, under arbitrarily fast switching, an a priori bound for the steady-state performance of the tracking error and a tunable bound for the transient error. Finally, the proposed method, by overcoming the need for subsystems with common sign of the input vector field, enlarges the class of uncertain switched nonlinear systems for which the adaptive tracking problem can be solved. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the proposed control scheme.