George J. Pappas, Graduate Student
(Professor S. Shankar Sastry)
The analysis and design of large scale systems is usually an extremely complex process. In order to reduce the complexity of the analysis, simplified models of the original system, called abstractions, which capture the system behavior of interest are obtained and analyzed. If the abstraction of system can be shown to satisfy certain properties of interest then so does the original complex plant. From a design perspective, the complexity of large scale systems is reduced by hierarchical structures. In hierarchies, systems of higher functionality reside at higher levels of the hierarchy and should be thought of as abstractions of lower level systems. In this work, the notion of abstractions of continuous systems is formalized and and issues related to hierarchies of dynamical and control systems are discussed.