Automatic design of a maglev controller in state space

The authors describe automatic synthesis of a global nonlinear controller for stabilizing a magnetic levitation system-a simplified model for the German Transrapid system. The synthesized control system stabilizes the maglev vehicle with much larger initial displacements than those allowed in a previous linear design for the same system. Simulation shows that the nonlinear design considered outperforms the linear design by a factor of 20 on the nominal model of the system. The nonlinear controller is automatically designed with the Control Engineer´s Workbench, a computational environment integrating a suite of programs that automatically analyze and design global nonlinear control systems