Catania, Italy, September 5-8, 2017

The fractional order controllers (FOC) can be very beneficial to different control problems (industrial plants, automated systems, robots, unmanned vehicles, automotive systems, etc.), although the control engineers and the research community is not aware of the potentialities provided by FOCs once compered to classic integer-order controllers.

The Training School, organized by Prof. Riccardo Caponetto (University of Catania, Italy) and Prof. Guido Maione (Politecnico di Bari, Italy), was dedicated to the design, implementation and application of FOCs, where the design methods of FOC and of FOC-based control architectures were described and explained in details. Moreover, the realization of FOC was discussed and techniques analysed to make the trainees aware of the implementation issues. Finally, within computer labs some real cases were considered to show the application of fractional controllers to different engineering problems of practical interest.

The Training School made the trainees aware of the benefits of FOC compared to integer-order controllers, like standard PID or other types of controllers. In particular, the trainers have shown that a better trade-off between dynamic performance and robust stability can be achieved with a limited cost with respect to other controllers.

Within the COST Action CA15225, the Training School was covered the following trainers and their topics: 

• • •  Prof. Igor Podlubny (Slovakia) – Mathematical and computational tools for fractional-order control
    • Prof. Blas M. Vinagre (Spain) – Fractional Order Control: Fundamentals and User Guide – Slides

• Prof. Guido Maione (Italy) – Some design approaches of fractional order controllers for electro-mechanical and automotive systems – Slides 
• Prof. Paolo Lino (Italy) – Modelling and implementation issues of fractional order controllers: Some case studies –
• Prof. Vicente Feliu (Spain) – Fractional order robust control of mechatronic systems – Slides – Preliminaries, Slides – Standard design, Slides – Gain Robustness , Slides – Resonant Freq. Robustness, Slides – Application 
• Prof. Duarte Valerio (Portugal) – Fractional Calculus with variable orders – Slides, Lecture notes, Ref2011, Ref2013, Ref2017,
• Prof. Milan Rapaić (Serbia) – Modelling, Identification and Simulation of Non-rational Linear Systems – Slides
• Prof. Karabi Biswas (India) – From the definition to the realization of single component fractor – Slides – part 1, Slides – part2, Slides – part3,
• Prof. Arturo Buscarino (Italy) – Jump resonance fractional order circuits: theory and experiments  
  

The 4-day Training School was attended by 20 Trainees from Spain, Italy, Belgium, Egypt, Czech Republic, Serbia, Montenegro, Poland, and Turkey.

Lecture on fractional order element; the fractor; design with Prof. Biswas Karabi

Computer labs on fractional order robust control with Prof. Vicente Feliu