Abstract

It is common for systems to evolve with time in a chaotic way. In practice, however, it is often desired that chaos be avoided and/or that the system be optimized with respect to some performance criterion. Given a system which behaves chaotically, one approach might be to make some large (and possibly costly) alteration in the system which completely changes its dynamics in such a way as to achieve the desired objectives. Here we assume that this avenue is not available. Thus we address the following question: Given a chaotic system, how can we obtain improved performance and achieve a desired attracting time-periodic motion by making only small controlling temporal perturbations in an accessible system parameter.

© 1992 Optical Society of America