We discuss the modelling framework of port-Hamiltonian descriptor systems and their use in numerical simulation and control. The structure is ideal for automated network-based modelling since it is invariant under power-conserving interconnection, congruence transformations and Galerkin projection. Moreover, stability and passivity properties are easily shown. Condensed forms under orthogonal transformations present easy analysis tools for existence, uniqueness, regularity and numerical methods to check these properties.After recalling the concepts for general linear and nonlinear descriptor systems, we demonstrate that many difficulties that arise in general descriptor systems can be easily overcome within the port-Hamiltonian framework. The properties of port-Hamiltonian descriptor systems are analysed, and time discretization and numerical linear algebra techniques are discussed. Structure-preserving regularization procedures for descriptor systems are presented to make them suitable for simulation and control. Model reduction techniques that preserve the structure and stabilization and optimal control techniques are discussed.The properties of port-Hamiltonian descriptor systems and their use in modelling simulation and control methods are illustrated with several examples from different physical domains. The survey concludes with open problems and research topics that deserve further attention.

We propose a new model reduction framework for problems that exhibit transport phenomena. As in the moving finite element method (MFEM), our method employs time-dependent transformation operators and, especially, generalizes MFEM to arbitrary basis functions. The new framework is suitable to obtain a low-dimensional approximation with small errors even in situations where classical model order reduction techniques require much higher dimensions for a similar approximation quality. Analogously to the MFEM framework, the reduced model is designed to minimize the residual, which is also the basis for ana posteriorierror bound. Moreover, since the dependence of the transformation operators on the reduced state is nonlinear, the resulting reduced order model is obtained by projecting the original evolution equation onto a nonlinear manifold. Furthermore, for a special case, we show a connection between our approach and the method of freezing, which is also known as symmetry reduction. Besides the construction of the reduced order model, we also analyze the problem of finding optimal basis functions based on given data of the full order solution. Especially, we show that the corresponding minimization problem has a solution and reduces to the proper orthogonal decomposition of transformed data in a special case. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of our method with several analytical and numerical examples.

We investigate an energy-based formulation of the two-field poroelasticity model and the related multiple-network model as they appear in geosciences or medical applications. We propose a port-Hamiltonian formulation of the system equations, which is beneficial for preserving important system properties after discretization or model-order reduction. For this, we include the commonly omitted second-order term and consider the corresponding first-order formulation. The port-Hamiltonian formulation of the quasi-static case is then obtained by (formally) setting the second-order term zero. Further, we interpret the poroelastic equations as an interconnection of a network of submodels with internal energies, adding a control-theoretic understanding of the poroelastic equations.