An Input-to-State Safety Approach Towards Safe Control of a Class of Parabolic PDEs Under Disturbances

Abstract: Distributed Parameter Systems (DPSs), modelled by partial differential equations (PDEs), are increasingly vulnerable to disturbances arising from various sources. Although detection of disturbances in PDE systems have received considerable attention in existing literature, safety control of PDEs under disturbances remains significantly under-explored. In this context, we explore a practical input-to-state safety (pISSf) based control design approach for a class of DPSs modelled by linear Parabolic PDEs. Specifically, we develop a control design framework for this class of system with both safety and stability guarantees based on control Lyapunov functional and control barrier functional. To illustrate our methodology, we apply our strategy to design a thermal control system for battery modules under disturbance. Several simulation studies are done to show the efficacy of our method.