Full-Day Live Workshop

Data-based Methods for Interconnected Systems:
Theory and Algorithms

IFAC World Congress 2020

Date: July 11, 2020

Location:  Berlin, Germany

Organizers

Anne Koch - University of Stuttgart, Germany

Maria Prandini - Politecnico di Milano, Italy

Motivation and objectives

With systems becoming more and more complex and interconnected, obtaining a suitable mathematical model from first principles becomes a time-consuming, challenging or almost impossible task. At the same time, data are often readily available or can be easily collected.

The underlying idea of data-based methods is hence to let the data speak and exploit directly the information hidden in data for analysis and design purposes.

This workshop will comprise recent advances and developments, and new data-based approaches to cope with interconnected systems as found in a wide range of highly relevant problems in nature, engineering as well as societal structures. In a data-based setting, such interconnected systems introduce challenges like the need to get information on the single subsystems as well as the interconnection structure through appropriate sensing and excitation actions, or to adopt distributed strategies so as to obtain scalable solution in terms of communication and computation effort and preserve privacy of locally available data, addressing security and resilience issues.

The workshop will expose attendees to cutting edge research in the field, with an eye on both theory and algorithmic solutions, providing insight on the challenges of contemporary interest in the field of data-based methods for systems and control applications and on promising directions of research.

This will help students new to the field to get a glance on the relevant issues. It will also encourage collaborations between researchers on further theoretical and algorithmic developments in the field.

Schedule

The live workshop is organized in sessions of two presentations each (1 on modeling, 2 on design, including control and optimization, and 1 on analysis), followed by a Q&A part.

A brief motivating introduction starts the workshop, and some concluding remarks are given at the end.

Slides of the talks can be downloaded here.

Abstracts of the talks and cv of organizers and speakers can be download here.

Target audience and prerequisites

The workshop aims at attracting graduate students and researchers with an interest in data-based methods for systems and control applications, with a special focus on interconnected systems, to get them exposed to the fundamentals, and to point out recent advances and open research directions in the field. The target audience also includes researchers that are more inclined towards algorithmic than to theoretical aspects. Emphasis will be given on illustrating the potential of applying the theoretical approaches to challenges in relevant application sectors.

The topic of the workshop is quite broad, however, there are no particular prerequisites for attendees, and any graduate level control engineer should be able to benefit from attending, not only grasping the main concepts but also achieving some deep level of understanding. It would be beneficial, however, if attendees have a strong mathematical background, possibly being familiar with control and systems theory. Attendees from other disciplines than control (e.g., computer science, operations research, robotics) are also qualified to attend the workshop, since the talks are expected to be self-contained, introducing the necessary prerequisites.

For any questions, please refer to the workshop organizers Anne Koch and Maria Prandini.