Feedback Optimization for Socio-Physical Networks (Prof. Gianluca Bianchin, ICTEAM & Department Mathematical Engineering University of Louvain)

Systems & Control Seminar

• Wednesday 08.11.2023, 15:00
• Room A145, Building 3403, Appelstr. 11

Abstract

From energy and transportation systems to networks of disease spread, socio-physical networks (namely, networks of humans and smart physical objects) are central to many modern societies
and will play a vital role in their sustainable development. Ensuring efficiency and sustainable development of socio-physical networks amounts to finding effective ways to operate these complex systems in an optimal fashion. A rapidly emerging control paradigm called feedback optimization sets forward as one of the most promising control solution to meet these societal goals. In this talk, I will introduce the basic framework of feedback optimization and discuss our recent research findings and performance bounds. I will first review classical techniques from numerical optimization and then translate these tools to solve control problems. While these results are relevant for a wide range of applications, specific focus will be given to traffic management problems in transportation systems with humans-in-the-loop.

Biographical information

Gianluca Bianchin is an Assistant Professor in the ICTEAM Institute and Department of Mathematical Engineering at the Universit´e Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He received the Doctor
of Philosophy degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California Riverside in 2020, the Laurea degree in Information Engineering, and the Laurea Magistrale degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Controls Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the ECEE Department at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2020 to 2022. In 2018 he joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a Graduate Intern and in 2019 the Bosch Research Center as a Research Intern. Prof. Bianchin is the recipient of the Dissertation Year Award and the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship Award from the University of California Riverside; his work on secure navigation was the Elsevier Journal of Automatica Editor’s choice of the month in February 2020. His research interests include dynamical systems and control theory and their applications in traffic control and complex network control.