Set-Based Robust Control Co-Design: Application to a Hybrid Thermal Management System

Control co-design (CCD) techniques are effective design tools for systems with highly transient operation, such as vehicle power and thermal management systems, where electrification necessitates a shift away from steady-state cooling solutions to transient thermal management that can respond to dynamic heat generation. The primary control objective of such systems is guaranteeing robustness to uncertainty in exogenous disturbance signals. Set-based methods are well suited for solving such optimization problems due to their ability to guarantee satisfaction of safety constraints. While a principal challenge with set-based methods is their computational expense, recent work has provided new ways to exactly and efficiently conduct set-based optimization for mixed logical dynamical (MLD) systems. In this work, we show how these methods can be applied to the problem of robust CCD for a hybrid thermal management system subject to a time-varying disturbance set.