Safety-preserving closed-loop control of anesthesia.

In safety-critical control systems, such as closed-loop control of anesthesia, it is of utmost importance to guarantee the ability of a control approach to maintain states of the systems within a safe region. In this paper, we address the problem by applying a safety-preserving control technique to anesthesia control. The approach relies on a conservative approximation of the viability set. The set specifies initial states for which there exists an input that keeps the trajectory emanating from those states within the safe region. This approach can be applied to any type of controller which satisfies the performance criteria. Furthermore, it prevents the performance controller from taking the states out of the safe region.