Solving problems for nonlinear control systems using webMathematica

Heli Rennik, Maris Tõnso, Ülle Kotta

Institute of Cybernetics, Tallinn University of Technology, Estonia

Abstract

Mathematica package NLControl, developed within Mathematica environment, has been made available over the internet using webMathematica. NLControl package is developed in Estonia in the Institute of Cybernetics at Tallinn University of Technology and consists of functions that assist the solution of different modeling, analysis and synthesis problems for nonlinear control systems, both for discrete- and continuous-time systems and also for systems described on homogenous time scales.

At moment website consists of 25 different function pages, including 13 different functions. Because these Mathematica functions cannot be used outside of Mathematica environment, our task was to make part of this package available over the internet. The purpose for making the functions from NLControl package available over the internet was twofold. First, to use this website in graduate courses and second to make the functions available to a larger control community, having, in general, no access to Mathematica.

For developing a webMathematica page one has to know HTML basics and use a web browser. In our website we use HTML, Java and JavaScript programming languages. Our webMathematica is installed on the Linux operating system, using Apache Tomcat as a web container. We are using only one kernel and one kernel pool.

Our website is available at http://webmathematica.cc.ioc.ee/webmathematica/NLControl and is already used by the researchers in the Institute of Cybernetics at TUT and other scientists in the control community. Our future goal is to implement more functions into webMathematica website which are already included in NLControl.