Professor Valeri Ougrinovski

Research Profile

The main topic of Prof. Ougrinovski's research has been the mathematical control systems theory. Control Theory is a branch of Applied Mathematics concerned with mathematical foundations that underpin methodologies for the analysis and design of engineering control systems. Within that broad area, the main direction of Prof. Ougrinovski's  work has been concerned with mathematical tools for analysis and synthesis of control systems tolerant to modelling errors and disturbances, called robust control systems.  Robustness is a fundamental property of engineering systems that reflects their ability to maintain adequate performance in the face of imprecise a priori knowledge of system characteristics.

The early work of Prof. Ougrinovski was concerned with extending the mainstream H-infinity control design methodology into the realm of control systems subject to noises. The stochastic version of H-infinity control theory developed by Prof. Ougrinovski has allowed this milestone control design methodology to be applied to systems operating under the influence of randomly varying noise. It showed that a non-conservative and tractable analysis is possible in some cases where the conventional main instruments of robust control analysis are not readily applicable.

In the late 1990s - early 2000s, Prof. Ougrinovski and his colleagues including Prof I.R. Petersen and Prof M.R. James from the Australian National University developed the Minimax Linear-Quadratic-Gaussian (Minimax LQG) control design methodology. This methodology provided an important bridge between the modern methodology of robust control design via H-infinity methods, on one hand, and the classical method of optimal LQG control design, on the other hand. It allowed controllers with guaranteed and robust performance to be designed for control systems, where only partial information on the system is available for measurement. Since then, Prof Ougrinovski has successfully developed this methodology into a comprehensive theory which covers robustness issues arising in a large number of modern control systems design problems. These problems include synthesis of robust decentralized controllers, robustness of controllers for systems subject to random parameter changes, design of filters and observers for systems subject to model uncertainty, hidden Markov models estimation.
 
In the last several years, Prof Ougrinovski's work has focused on the development of the theory of distributed control and estimation of large-scale complex systems. His work aims to tackle challenging problems arising from system heterogeneity and information constraints. It is concerned with developing a systematic theory of distributed robust estimation targeting systems and processes in large networks of sensing nodes. This theory covers issues of synthesis of reliably performing networks in situations where the cooperation and communication between constituent elements of the network is critical for the network to function properly. His latest research aims to address new problems of control system security and resilience against strategic threats arising in the emerging theory of cyber-physical control systems.

Professor Ougrinovski serves, or has served, as an Associate Editor for leading journals in the discipline of systems and control: Automatica, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, IEEE Control Systems Letters (L-CSS), IET Control Theory and Applications. He is a member of IEEE Control Systems Society Editorial Board and has been actively involved in the conference organisation including the most prestigious conferences. He has served on program committees of several international conferences including the Joint IEEE Conference on Decision and Control - European Control Conference, Seville, 2005, IEEE Multi-Conference on Systems and Control, Sydney, 2015, and the series of Australian Control Conferences held annually (2011-2015). In 2014, he served as the Program Chair for the 2014 Australian Control Conference held in Canberra in November 2014. Also, he was a member of Organising Committees for the international IEEE 2016 Conference ”Norbert Wiener in the 21st Century”, Melbourne 2016, and 56th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (Melbourne, 2017), and is currently member of Organising Committees for the 59th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control to be held in Korea in December 2020.