Control Synthesis for Partial Differential Equations from Spatio-Temporal Specifications

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a new boundary control synthesis problem with temporal logic specifications for a wide range of linear partial differential equations. We leverage the finite element method (FEM) to reduce the problem to a control problem for discrete-time linear systems. The specifications are formalized using an extension of signal temporal logic (STL), called Spatial-STL (S-STL). A conservative procedure to reformulate the specification into a regular STL formula as part of the FEM reduction is presented. A mixed-integer linear encoding is then used to synthesize the control inputs from a given allowed set. We illustrate the algorithm by applying it to a heat propagation problem.