Book review
System Design through MATLAB®, Control Toolbox and SIMULINK®
Krishna K. Singh, Gayatri Agnihotri
Springer-Verlag, London, 2001, ISBN 1-85233-337-5
This book is uniquely dedicated for anyone who wishes
to learn and try out simulations in Systems Engineering
using Matlab® platform through its built-in Control
System Toolbox and Simulink®. In order to use this
book, it is necessary to have knowledge of System
Engineering, Control Systems, Matlab® and Simulink®.
Matlab®, developed by the MathWorks Inc., has been a
strong software for high-performance, numerical
computations and visualisations. The fact that it provides
an interactive environment with large number of built-in
functions for technical computations, graphics and
animations makes it an excellent tool for a very large
variety of subjects. In association with Simulink® and
Control Toolbox, it provides the scientific community
with a powerful tool for the design, analysis and
response study of systems.
Study and analysis of any system requires some kind of
its equivalent representation that describes the various
components of the system and the relationship between
them. This equivalent representation of the system, also
known as model of the system may be of several types.
The Control System Toolbox of Matlab® supports
generation of models for linear Time-Invariant (LTI)
systems in four main forms: Zero/pole/gain model;
transfer function model; state space model; frequency
response data model. These models can be created for
continuous-time systems and discrete-time systems that
may be either SISO (single input/single output) type or
MIMO (multiple input/multiple output) type. All the
Matlab® Control Toolbox functions and Simulink®
functions dedicated to these four types of models are
presented and studied in this book.
This book is organised in 9 chapters, which go to the
basic system representation and modelling to some
complex applications. All chapters are constructed with
the same outline. Each chapter begin with a short recall
of the theory and / or principles considered. In particular,
the Matlab® and Simulink® functions used in the
considered chapter are recalled and their options and
properties are detailed and explained. The using of these
functions is described in a second time by using some
short and detailed examples. The authors propose in a
third time to make some simplest practice test in order to
verify the good understanding of the reader. All chapters
conclude with problems leading to self-study
assignments. It can be noticed that all examples and the
corrections of the practice tests and problems are
proposed on an Internet site.
Before referring to the contents and structure of the
book, it is appropriate to briefly list the titles of each of
the 9 chapters with a brief description of their contents:
Chapter 1. System Representation and Modelling: Here
an explication of the models creation for various systems
and model properties assignment is provided.
Chapter 2. Model Manipulation: The manipulation of the
models of systems / subsystems to obtain a larger system
by performing arithmetic operations on them and / or
interconnecting them is presented.
Chapter 3. Getting Information from the Models: This
chapter is dedicated to the techniques of data extraction
from all the four types of models, which can be studied
in this book.
Chapter 4. Model Analysis: This chapter describes how
the model dynamics of a system, the time response of a
system, the frequency response of a system and / or the
state space analysis of a system can be performed.
Chapter 5. The Control System Toolbox’s GUIs: The
presentation of the using of the two Graphic User
Interfaces (GUI) provided with the Control System
Toolbox is performed. These two GUI are, the LTI
Viewer which performs linear analysis, and the Root
Locus Design GUI for obtaining and analysing the root
locus plot of SISO LTI models.
Chapter 6. Control System Design through Simulink®:
Here the same problems as those presented in the
preceding chapters are solved by using the interactive
environment of Simulink®.
Chapter 7. Design of Compensators for Control Systems:
This chapter is dedicated to the presentation of two
particular methods, the classical or conventional
designing techniques based upon Root Locus, Bode plot
and Nichols chart, and the modern methods involving
pole placement and optimisation techniques.
Chapter 8. Some Simple Applications: In this chapter, the
simulations of some simple real physical systems are
performed.
Chapter 9. Some Complex Applications: Here, more
complex real systems are studied.
Each chapter ends with problems that are related to the
relevant chapter. The growing difficulty of these
problems provides a good knowledge test on the
considered subject.
Some other books focus to the same subject (Cavallo,
1996; Shanian, 1993). However, these books are
dedicated to the old versions of Matlab® and many
modifications and addenda are performed like the
integration of the two GUI in the Control System
Toolbox that which explain the great interest of this new
book.
The fact that nor the basic principles of Matlab®
programming nor the system design principles are
recalled permits to the authors to focus on the core of the
book. So, the presentations of this book are well suited
for researchers and teachers with expertise in system
design and knowledge in Matlab® programming and
who desire to use the Matlab® Control System Toolbox
or Simulink®. However, I do not feel this book is
appropriate for students. For the students, it seems
preferable that a teacher uses this book in order to
construct a course, which recall the theoretical principles
of the system design in the same time as the practical
examples.
References
Cavallo, A. (1996). Using Matlab, Simulink, and Control System
Toolbox: a practical approach. Englewood, Cliffs, NJ: Prentice
Hall.
Shanian, B. (1993). Control system design using Matlab. Englewood,
Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
Philippe Thomas
Systems and Transportation Laboratory,
Technical University of Belfort-Montbéliard,
90010 Belfort Cedex, France
E-mail address: philippe.thomas@utbm.fr
About the reviewer
Philippe Thomas completed the Ph. D. at the University Henri
Poincaré Nancy 1 in 1997 and then spent 2 years in the industry where
he was involved in European project dealing with data mining and
Bayesian Belief Networks. Since 1999, he has been with the Systems
and Transportation Laboratory, Technical University of Belfort-
Montbéliard where he is currently an Associate Professor. Dr.
Thomas’s main research interests are centred on system modelisation
and diagnosis based by using neural networks. His application domain
is the urban traffic supervision.