- Update to the Grünwald-Letnikov based FODE solver: added higher-order numerical solver options — the default and only available option up to this point was the first order solver; now, the user gets the option of also choosing second and third order numerical schemes for computing the time domain response of systems described by fractional-order transfer function objects. The setting can be configured in the new option `GL_Order` found under `Simulations` in the toolbox configuration.
- Completely rewritten is the configuration options handler. This is, in some ways, a breaking change, but at the same time one that should not affect the majority of users. Whereas before the user had to store or recall toolbox-wide configuration options him or herself and the configuration was stored in MATLAB workspace rather than in the user’s file system, the new approach is to: (1) Store the configuration as a file in the user’s home directory under the `.fomcon-matlab` folder. This way, the configuration options are persistent from session to session. (2) Perform a check on the options, so if new options are added in the future, there is no backwards compatibility problem. On the other hand, the validity of the inserted values/ranges for the configuration parameters are currently not checked, this is a feature that was also missing previously and will be added in the future.
- Added a new demo which pertains to the above mentioned solver update to show the differences in the solutions that can be obtained using various methods and with different solver orders.
- Released a packaged toolbox version of the toolbox.
- Some minor bugs/compatibility problems have been fixed.
- In newer versions of MATLAB, a warning is displayed when the UI of the toolbox configuration dialog is displayed about the deprecation of certain Java components. In FOMCON, a contribution called propertiesGUI is used to display this configuration box and it has not been updated since 2015. In a future version of the toolbox, it is likely to be replaced with a custom, programmatic UI.
And that’s not all!
I would like to direct your attention to an alpha release of FOMCON toolbox for Python 3! You can check it out on GitHub (https://github.com/outstandn/fomcon) and find out more by visiting this link with the information about the associated paper and a conference talk. If you find it useful, please help spreading the word and cite the following paper:- T. Onyedi, A. Tepljakov, and E. Petlenkov, “FOMCONpy: Fractional-order Modelling and Control Library for Python,” 2020 43rd International Conference on Telecommunications and Signal Processing (TSP), 2020.