“Automatic Control Knowledge Repository” – A Computational Approach for Simpler and More Robust Reproducibility of Results in Control Theory

摘要

As many other disciplines, control theory to some degree suffers from a reproducibility crisis. In particular, since computational methods like simulation, numeric approximation or computer algebra play an important role, the reproducibility of results relies on implementation details, which are typically out of scope for written papers. While some publications do reference the source code of the respective software, this is by far not standard in industry and academia. Additionally, having access to the source code does not imply reproducibility due to dependency issues w. r. t. hardware and software components. This paper proposes a three-component approach to mitigate the problem: a) an open repository with a suitable data structure to publish formal problem specifications and problem solutions (each represented as source code) along with necessary metadata, b) a web service that automatically checks the solution methods against the problem specifications and auxiliary software for local testing and c) a peer-oriented process scheme to organize both the contribution process to that repo and formal quality assurance. The proposed concept offers simplified and more robust reproducibility, as well as increased visibility of published results and a community-curated set of reference implementations for control-related methods.