44 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » august 2014

ANNA G. STEfANOpOuLOuQ. How did your education and early career lead to your initial and con-tinuing interest in the control field?

Anna: I always liked powerful machines, so learning how to control them was the ultimate career dream. I started with model-based control of big marine engines and naval propulsion and then moved to cars and trucks. Beyond automotive powertrain control, I have had the privilege to work a bit on the thermal management of satellite batteries and startup optimization of stationary fuel cells for backup power.

Q. What are some of your research interests?

Anna: The combination of mathe-matics and physics in the thrilling appli-cations of the power and energy sector are gratifying and full of rewards due to their importance for the environment. Most of my efforts are in the modeling and parameterization phase, given that I tend to work with novel processes and systems so there are no existing math-ematical models for control design. My research portfolio is driven by the appli-cations needs and not the theory or the methodology. I am fortunate to be able

to collaborate with many control theory experts when I formulate the problem, and I can identify the most promising methodology or the gap in existing methodologies.

Q. Describe a course that you teach related to control.

Anna: Three years ago, the U.S. Department of Energy funded a group of professors at the University of Mich-igan to develop courses on electrifica-tion education. Scott Moura, Hossam Fathy, and I developed a Battery Con-trols course. The course is so popu-lar that I offer it in-distance learning modules for various companies all over the world. Some of my students are managers in large corporations, some students are unemployed and looking for a new opportunity in the automotive sector, and a few students have a significant coating of math-rust, and most of the students lack the basic control background. Luckily the intense interest in understanding and innovating in battery management systems aligns everybody after two to three weeks, and the course becomes very rewarding.

Q. What are some of the most prom-ising opportunities you see in the control field?

Anna: I am very interested in esti-mation problems and sensor selection since the measurements are crucial for feedback control performance and robustness but also dictate the cost in terms of dollars.

Some of the most exiting problems are switching (multimode) combus-tion in internal combustion engines and distributed parameter systems. Our theory has too many assumptions to apply in a realistic problem.

Consider, for example, a battery pack. The physics dictate and typical observ-ability analysis will show that you need to measure the voltage of each cell in the pack, and the temperature every four cells, which is too expensive! Can we do better? How do we optimize constrained resources under model uncertainty?

Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2014.2320358

Date of publication: 14 July 2014

anna with her daughter Katerina and hus-band Jim Freudenberg. (Photograph cour-tesy of Lino guzzella.)

anna and lab mates feeling puzzled in front of a medium-duty diesel engine after an abrupt shutdown.

anna and Jason siegel embedding distrib-uted temperature sensors from general Electric in Panasonic battery cells from a Ford C-Max as part of an aRPa-E project.

august 2014 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 45

What are the confidence levels of our sensing allocation and estimation deci-sions? The fault detection and diagnostics problem is also very pressing and a very fertile area for the controls community.

Q. You are a committee member of a National Academies Committee that will assess the feasibility of and strat-egy for reaching a corporate-wide fuel economy of 54.5 mi/gal by 2025. What topics will your report cover?

Anna: The National Research Coun-cil invited me to help the committee with the ubiquitous and increasing influence of control technologies in the modern automobile. The focus of the committee is on fuel efficiency. I was called to quantify the impact of modeling, simulations, control, and calibration on reductions of light-duty vehicle fuel consumption. In the quest to quantify and document the suc-cesses, I called many of the industrial members from our Society for help. Powertrain and vehicle control design is an enabling technology and has doc-umented impact on the transient per-formance, calibration time, robustness against environmental conditions, and finally safety. It has been harder, how-

ever, to connect the controls with fuel consumption. Most of the time, reduc-tions in fuel consumption are attrib-uted to novel hardware but the auto-mation and optimization of the novel hardware within the overall system is, as Karl Åström said, the hidden tech-nology. The report will be finalized in early 2015 so I urge the readers of IEEE Control Systems Magazine to contact me if they have great stories to share!

Q. What are some of your interests and activities outside of your profes-sional career?

Anna: Traveling and goofing off with my family!

Q. Thank you for your comments.Anna: Thank you for the opportu-

nity to talk to you.

Profile of Anna G. Stefanopoulou• Current position: professor of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering

and Naval architecture and Marine Engineering, university of Michigan.

• Past positions: technical specialist, Ford Motor Company, 1996–1997; assis-

tant professor, university of California, santa Barbara, 1998–2000.

• Contact information: Mechanical Engineering, university of Michigan CoE/

2044 WE Lay auto Lab, 1231 Beal ave., ann arbor, Michigan 48109-2133

usa, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~annastef/.

• IEEE Control Systems Society experience highlights: associate editor, IEEE

Transactions in Control Systems Technology, 2002–2010; member of various

IEEE Control systems society and american automatic Control Council com-

mittees, 2004–present; Board of governors, 2006–2009.

• Notable awards: NsF Career award; saE Ralph R. teetor Educational

award; IEEE transaction Control system technology Outstanding Paper

award; asME Dynamic systems and Control Division Outstanding Young

Investigator award; MIt technology Young Innovator; asME gustus L. Lar-

son Memorial award; asME Fellow; IEEE Fellow.

» Be a champion for the impor-tance of research.

» Make the assessment of the research enterprise an annual rather than one-time event.

» Educate universities on the folly of basing hiring and promotion decisions on numerical indices of journal impact factors or cita-tions to papers.

» Provide tools to check for plagia-rism and index the originality of a concept.

» Develop effective methods to locate relevant qualified poten-tial collaborators.

These recommendations were not intended as specific recommendations for the IEEE as a whole. Rather, the rec-ommendations are to those organiza-tions that want to attract and support researchers in the future, which is an objective of TAB but may be less impor-tant in other parts of the IEEE. In addi-tion to these recommendations, the 28-page white paper includes detailed discussions of the various changes in how research is generated and pub-lished. These discussions, and specific comments made by participants at these meetings, are interesting read-ing for anyone with a stake in research

publications. Topics include 1) frustra-tions with the current academic fund-ing and research process, 2) the huge apparent difference in literature search tools used by different countries, and 3) postulations on how research and publishing may be different in 2018 and 2023.

REfERENCE[1] B. Hebner, L. Creighton, and J. Keaton, “Im-plications of the Changing Research Enterprise,” white paper, IEEE, Jan. 2014.

Richard D. Braatz

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