A Survey of the Probability Density Function Control for Stochastic Dynamic Systems

Probability density function (PDF) control strategy investigates the controller design approaches in order to to realise a desirable distributions shape control of the random variables for the stochastic processes. Different from the existing stochastic optimisation and control methods, the most important problem of PDF control is to establish the evolution of the PDF expressions of the system variables. Once the relationship between the control input and the output PDF is formulated, the control objective can be described as obtaining the control input signals which would adjust the system output PDFs to follow the pre-specified target PDFs. This paper summarises the recent research results of the PDF control while the controller design approaches can be categorised into three groups: 1) system model-based direct evolution PDF control; 2) model-based distribution-transformation PDF control methods and 3) data-based PDF control. In addition, minimum entropy control, PDF-based filter design, fault diagnosis and probabilistic decoupling design are also introduced briefly as extended applications in theory sense.