Ph.D. Student Olav Slupphaug

Status

I started my Ph.D. study in February 1995 and will finish my doctoral degree in 1998. My doctoral work is financed by the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. My advisor is Prof. Bjarne A. Foss.

Research area

I will work within the area of hybrid control, which in this context means control of processes which exhibits both discrete and continuous phenomena. In particular, I will study applications of developed theory to hybrid process control problems. During this first year of my study I have sorted out the research area in addition to taking the following courses:

• 9991 Representation and analysis of hybrid systems (self study)
• 43918 Non-linear process control
• 52052 Chemical reaction engineering
• 50513 Thermodynamics
• 52022 Separation Technology
• 990 Information retrieval

Activities

• Attended the "Workshop on Analysis and Design of Event-Driven Operations" at Imperial College.
• Visited Norsk Hydro and Statoil to get a feel for the state-of-the-art on the use of formal methods for hybrid process control.
• Visited the Swedish control groups at the University of Lund and at Chalmers University of Technology.
• Co-advisor on the diploma work of Anne Greibrokk.
• Co-advisor on the diploma work of Ole Kristian Sætnes.

Publications

• None

Plans for 1996

I will start out finding a simple but non-trivial control problem within the problem class and apply already developed theory for control in addition to propose a new approach. This work should result in a publication during the spring. Further, I plan to visit a well recognized research group within our research area for a period of 4-6 months. During this stay I will continue the work on our new approach.