Guest lecture by Prof. Murat Arcak, University of California, Berkeley, USA, on Control Synthesis with Formal Methods: Exploiting System Structure for Scalability
Seminars at NTNU AMOS in 2016
Guest lecture by Prof. Murat Arcak, University of California, Berkeley, USA, on Control Synthesis with Formal Methods: Exploiting System Structure for Scalability
ABSTRACT:
The field of formal methods has developed efficient techniques for the verification and synthesis of systems described by finite state transition models, such as computer programs and digital circuits. Leveraging formal methods to automate control synthesis for dynamical systems is an active and promising research area, but is hindered by two major problems: (1) the difficulty of abstracting a finite state transition model from a continuous dynamical model, and (2) when such abstraction is possible, the prohibitively large number of finite states that result even from a modest size continuous system. In this talk we present two structural properties that help us overcome these problems. The first property is “mixed monotonicity” which relaxes the classical notion of an order preserving (“monotone”) system. We will see how this property allows a computationally efficient finite abstraction and illustrate the result on a macroscopic model of vehicle traffic flow. The second property is decomposability into sparsely connected subsystems. Using this property, we will exhibit a compositional synthesis technique that constructs a composite controller by introducing “contracts” between the subsystems.
BIOGRAPHY:
Murat Arcak is a professor at U.C. Berkeley in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department. He received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from the Bogazici University, Istanbul, Turkey (1996) and the M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from the University of California, Santa Barbara (1997 and 2000). His research is in dynamical systems and control theory with applications to synthetic biology, multi-agent systems, and transportation. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, the Control and Systems Theory Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 2007, and the Antonio Ruberti Young Researcher Prize from the IEEE Control Systems Society in 2014. He is a member of SIAM and a fellow of IEEE.