Numerical Robustness Evaluation of Floating-Point Closed-Loop Control Based on Interval Analysis

Power-electronics-based systems have penetrated into several critical sectors, such as the industry, power generation, energy transmission and distribution, and transportation. In this context, the system’s control, often implemented in real-time processing units, has to meet stringent requirements in terms of safety and repeatability. Given the growing complexity of the implemented algorithms, floating-point arithmetic is being increasingly adopted for high-performance systems. This paper proposes to assess the numerical stability of the control algorithms by means of an interval analysis. The case study of an electric drive is considered, given the wide adoption of such systems and the importance they hold for the safety of the applications. In particular, two different control strategies—the resonant control and the vector space decomposition—are examined, and a sensitivity analysis based on the proposed technique highlights the different characteristics of the two with respect to numerical stability. The proposed method shows how the resonant control is more robust to variations of the controller gain coefficients with respect to the numerical stability, which could make it the preferred choice for mission-critical electric drive control.