Keynote speaker-Olaf Stursberg

Title: Autonomous and Cooperative Decision-Making in Cyber-Physical Systems

Abstract: Systems, such as groups of autonomous vehicles, power grids, or production plants, require the orchestration of several locally controlled subsystems, which exchange information, which may be physically coupled, and often include the interaction with human users. The control design for such systems, which are often termed cyber-physical systems (CPS), is challenging since it has to account for suitable cooperation or coordination of the subsystems, as well as for uncertainty and possibly time-varying situations, which require controller adaptation and learning. The talk proposes different control design techniques to address these challenges: The first part describes how a hierarchy of optimization-based decision routines leads to safe cooperation of autonomous vehicles. The second part outlines an approach to use the principles of model predictive control (MPC) within a distributed control setting, in which predictions are used not only for the local control of subsystems, but also to foresee and consider delay of communication in the network connecting the controlled subsystems. The following part addresses the question of how stochastically modeled uncertainties of the behavior of the CPS can be embedded into predictive control schemes. The final part reports on an approach to approximate the (often computationally demanding) step of synthesizing optimal control decisions by use of neural networks, while guaranteeing the satisfaction of constraints and convergence.

Biography: Olaf Stursberg is Full Professor of Control and System Theory in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at University of Kassel (Germany). He received a Ph.D. degree (Dr.-Ing.) in Engineering from University of Dortmund (Germany) in 2000, and he held positions as Postdoc at Carnegie Mellon University (USA), as Assistant Professor at University of Dortmund, and Associate Professor of Automation Systems at Technical University of Munich (Germany). Since 2009, he is head of the Control and System Theory Lab, and member of the directorate of the Institute of System Analytics and Control at University of Kassel. His current research interests include the control of networked and cyber-physical systems, optimal and predictive control, and the control of hybrid, discrete event, learning, and stochastic processes. He has published more than 200 papers in journals and proceedings of international conferences, and served in several program committees and editorial boards of different journals.