Canadian Journal of Chemical Engineering, Vol.79, No.1, 169-174, 2001
Bang-bang solution of nonlinear time-optimal control problems using a semi-exhaustive search
At times, the objective is to seek a bang-bang control policy for nonlinear time-optimal control problems. The usefulness of iterative dynamic programming (IDP) has been shown in the literature for solving such problems. However, the convergence to the optimal solution has been obtained from about 50% of the guessed values near the optimum. In this paper, we present a semiexhaustive search method for seeking such solutions and a comparison is made with the IDP. The results show that the convergence can be obtained from a significantly higher number of guessed values chosen over a much wider region around the optimum.