Dina Shona Laila

Dina Shona Laila is currently a Senior Lecturer in the School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Automotive, Faculty of Engineering, Environment and Computing, Coventry University.

Dina was born in Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, and spent most of her childhood living in several small towns around the forest in Sumatra, one of the main islands in Indonesia. She obtained her first degree in Electrical Engineering from the Institute of Technology Bandung (ITB), Indonesia. She was awarded a TMPD scholarship from the Indonesian Government to pursue a Master’s degree in Control Engineering also at ITB. During her Master’s study, she was awarded a Monbusho Scholarship from the Japanese Government, to spend 1.5 years as a visiting research student in Professor Araki Laboratory, Kyoto University, Japan, where she also conducted the research for her master thesis. She subsequently obtained a PhD degree in Control Engineering from the University of Melbourne, Australia, with the support of the AusAID scholarship from the Australian Government.

After finishing her PhD, she joined the Control and Power Group (EE CAP), Electrical and Electronic Engineering Dept., Imperial College London as a Research Associate (2003-2006, 2007-2009) working on various research projects in nonlinear control and in power systems monitoring. She was also with the Institute for Design and Control of Mechatronical Systems, Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria (2007-2008) where she was working on the topic of identification and control of mechatronics systems, particularly for combustion engine test bench and spent some time with ABB Research Centre, Baden Daetwill, Switzerland (2008) working on the power systems monitoring project.

Before joining Coventry, Dina was a Lecturer in the School of Engineering Sciences, Faculty of Engineering and the Environment, University of Southampton (2011-16), and prior to that she was with the School of Mechanical and Automotive Engineering, Kingston University, London (2009-2011).

Her research interests are mainly in the field of nonlinear control both in theory (for in continuous-time and discrete-time frameworks) and it applications. She has been working on various applications in automotive, power electronics, and electro-mechanical systems. Dina is a Senior Member of the IEEE. She actively serves as a member of the IEEE CSS Conference Editorial Board, an Associate Editor for the European Journal of Control and as a reviewer for a number of main journals and conferences in Control Engineering field.

• Laila, D.S., Něsíc, D., and Teel, A.R. (2002) ‘Open and closed loop dissipation inequalities under sampling and controller emulation’. European Journal of Control 8 (2), 109-125.
• Něsíc, D., and Laila, D.S. (2002) ‘A note on input-to-state stabilization for nonlinear sampled-data systems’. IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control 47 (7), 1153-1158.
• Laila, D.S., and Něsíc, D. (2003) ‘Changing supply rates for input-output to state stable discrete-time nonlinear systems with applications’. Automatica 39 (5), 821-835.
• Laila, D.S., and Něsíc, D. (2003) ‘Discrete-time Lyapunov based small-gain theorem for parameterized interconnected ISS systems’. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control 48 (10), 1783-1788.
• Laila, D.S., and Astolfi, A. (2005) ‘Input-to-state stability for discrete-time time-varying systems with applications to robust stabilization of systems in power form’. Automatica 41 (11), 1891-1903.
• Laila, D.S., and Astolfi, A. (2006) ‘Construction of discrete-time model for port-controlled Hamiltonian systems with applications’. Systems and Control Letters 55 (8), 673-680. 
• Laila, D.S., Messina, A.R., and Pal, B.C. (2009) ‘A refined Hilbert-Huang transform with applications to interarea oscillation monitoring’. IEEE Transactions on Power Systems 24 (2), 610-620.
• Laila, D.S., Lovera, M., and Astolfi, A. (2011) ‘A discrete-time observer design for spacecraft attitude determination using an orthogonality preserving algorithm’. Automatica 47 (5), 975-980.
• Navarro-Lopez, E.M., and Laila, D.S. (2013) ‘Group and Total Dissipativity and Stability of Multi-Equilibria Hybrid Automata’. IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control 58, 3196-3202.
• Sowman, J., Laila, D.S, Cruden, A.J., and Fussey, P. (2015) ‘Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for Cold Start Selective Catalytic Reduction’. In Muñoz de la Peña, D., and  Limón, D. (eds.) IFAC-PapersOnLine, ‘5th IFAC Conference on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control NMPC 2015’. Held 17-20 September 2015 in Seville, Spain. Elsevier Ltd., 471-476.
• Sowman, J., Laila, D.S., and Longo, S. (2015) ‘Real-Time Approximate Explicit Nonlinear Model Predictive Control for the Swing-Up of a Reaction Wheel Pendulum’. In Proceedings of the 54th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control, ‘CDC’. Held 15-18 December 2015 in Osaka, Japan.
• Laila, D.S., and Gruenbacher, E. (2016) ‘Nonlinear output feedback and periodic disturbance attenuation for setpoint tracking of a combustion engine test bench’. Automatica 64, 29-36.
• Cannella, G., Laila, D.S., and Freeman, C.T. (2016) ‘Mechanical Design of an Affordable Adaptive Gravity Balanced Orthosis for Upper Limb Stroke Rehabilitation’. Mechanics Based Design of Structures and Machines 44 (1-2), 96-108.
• Ryalat, M., and Laila, D.S (2016) ‘A simplified IDA-PBC design for underactuated mechanical systems with applications’. European Journal of Control 27, 1-16.
• Copur, E.H., Freeman, C.T., Chu, B., and Laila, D.S. (2016) ‘System Identification for FES-based Tremor Suppression’. European Journal of Control 27, 45-59.
• Kutlu, M., Freeman, C.T., Hallewell, E., Hughes, A-M., and Laila, D.S. (2016) ‘Upper-Limb Stroke Rehabilitation using Electrode Array Based Functional Electrical Stimulation with Sensing and Control Innovations’. Medical Engineering & Physics 38 (4), 366-379.
• Sowman, J., Laila, D.S., Truscott, A., Fussey, P., and Cruden, A.J. (2016) ‘Real-Time Rejection of Ammonia Cross Sensitivity in Sensors for Diesel Aftertreatment Systems by Parallel Particle Filtering’. European Control Conference. Held 29 June-1 July 2016 in Aalborg, Denmark.
• Guzman-Guemez, J., Laila, D.S., and Sharkh, S.M. (2016) ‘State-Space Approach for Modelling and Control of a Single-Phase Three-Level NPC Inverter with SVPWM’. IEEE PES General Meeting. Held 17-21 July 2016 in Boston, USA.

• Robust predictive control for high efficiency automotive emissions systems, Engineering Doctorate in Transport and Environment project funded by Ricardo UK Ltd. This research project studies the control design problem of Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) system for high efficiency diesel engine emission after-treatment. Using existing data, the model of SCR system is constructed, applying the continuous stir tank reactor (CSTR) structure. Model Predictive Control type controllers are designed for this system, and the performance is at the first stage tested in simulations. The aim of this project is to test the stability, robustness and performance of the controller, and to implement the controller using hardware, potentially FPGA based microcontroller.
• Nonlinear Systems Identification and Discrete-to-Continuous Dynamic Reconstruction for Control Applications, Royal Society Research Grant (RG140095) The importance of nonlinear control in industrial applications is growing due to the increase of systems complexity and demands on accuracy. While advanced nonlinear control methods and digital technology allow the design and implementation of the control algorithms, good nonlinear models of processes to be controlled rarely exist due to the rarity of practical nonlinear identification method. This research is to fill this gap, to address the identification & modelling of nonlinear dynamics. This research project comprises of two main activities, theoretical and experimental. The theoretical work to develop the discrete to continuous (D2C) algorithm to reconstruct the continuous-time model from a discrete-time model of bilinear systems obtained from identification and to use existing model for control application in Selective Catalytic Reduction (SCR) control design. The experimental work focusses on one application of the theoretical result, to diesel engine after-treatment system using SCR systems based on real measured emission data.

• Southampton City Bus Emission Monitoring, funded by Southampton City Council. This project is carried out by the Transportation Research Group at the University of Southampton to characterise the tailpipe emissions of city buses in Southampton. This work forms part of a larger project run by Southampton City Council and supported by the UK government Department for Transport, with the aim of improving air quality in Southampton by reducing the pollution coming from the gas emissions of the city public buses. The work of the Transportation Research Group was to collect benchmark data on the emissions of these vehicles prior to retrofitting thermal management and micro-hybrid technology to the busses, and thus enable a subsequent comparison after fitting, which would quantify the benefits of the scheme in terms of vehicle emissions and - more broadly - air quality in the city of Southampton.