15th Triennial World Congress of the International Federation of Automatic Control
  Barcelona, 21–26 July 2002 
SLIDING BIFURCATIONS IN RELAY CONTROL SYSTEMS: AN APPLICATION TO NATURAL RESOURCES MANAGEMENT
Fabio Dercole*,1 Alessandra Gragnani* Sergio Rinaldi*
* DEI, Politecnico di Milano
Via Ponzio 34/5, 20133 Milano, Italy

This paper is devoted to the study of the long term dynamic behavior of exploited natural resources. The focus is on the case of protected resources, namely resources that can not be harvested when they are too scarce. The model is a controlled system composed of a nonlinear second order SISO system and an on-off feedback controller. The analysis is performed through the numerical continuation of the sliding bifurcations of the system. The results show that for suitable combinations of the parameters the system can have multiple attractors.
Keywords: relay control, attractors, sliding, stability, nonlinear control systems

1Corresponding author: Ph: +39 02 2399 3484; Fax: +39 02 2399 3412;
E-mail: dercole@elet.polimi.it
Session slot T-Th-M08: Oscillations in Nonsmooth Feedback Systems/Area code 2c : Non-linear Systems