Plenary Speeches

Prof. Frank Allgöwer

From stabilizing to economic Model Predictive Control: A paradigm shift towards increased control performance

Abstract During the past decades model predictive control (MPC) has become a preferred control strategy for the control of a large number of industrial control problems from distillation control to autonomous driving. Computational issues, application aspects and systems theoretic properties of MPC (like stability and robustness) are rather well understood by now and the theory is well developed even for nonlinear systems. In standard MPC formulations, the considered control objective is typically the stabilization of some (given) setpoint or trajectory to be tracked. In contrast, the main focus in so-called economic MPC is on closed-loop performance where the cost to be optimized is related to some economic objective. This shift in the typical control task to be solved is of interest for many industrial applications. This concerns for example robot control, autonomous mobility, or industrial production processes. In this presentation we will first give an introduction to and an overview over the general field of model predictive control. An account of the development of model predictive control theory for nonlinear systems will be given focusing on requirements for the stability of the nonlinear closed loop. Then economic MPC will be introduced and a tutorial overview of the system theoretic aspects of economic MPC will be presented highlighting the advantages for various application scenarios. Finally distributed economic NMPC approaches for systems of systems will be discussed and an account of the state of the art in this field is given.

Biography Frank Allgöwer is professor in the Mechanical Engineering Department of the University of Stuttgart in Germany, director of the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control (IST) and director of the Stuttgart Research Centre for Systems Biology (SRCSB). He studied Engineering Cybernetics and Applied Mathematics in Stuttgart and at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) respectively and received his Ph.D. degree from the University of Stuttgart. Prior to his present appointment he held an assistant professorship in the electrical engineering department at ETH Zurich and visiting positions at Caltech, the NASA Ames Research Center, the DuPont Company, the University of California at Santa Barbara and the University of Newcastle in Australia. Since 2012 Frank serves in addition as Vice-President of Germany's most important research funding agency, the German Research Foundation (DFG) in Bonn, Germany.

Frank's main interests in research and teaching are in the area of systems and control with emphasis on the development of new methods for the analysis and control of nonlinear systems, networks of systems, optimization based control and data based control. His application interests span a wide range from chemical engineering via mechatronic systems to systems biology. He has published over 500 scientific articles on his research and received several recognitions including several best paper awards, an IFAC Fellowship, the IFAC Outstanding Service Award, the IEEE CSS Distinguished Member Award, the State Teaching Award of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, and the Leibniz Prize, which is the most prestigious award in science and engineering awarded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft.

Frank is involved in various scientific and societal organizations. Since 2017 he is the President of International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). Prior to that he was chairman of the IFAC Technical Committee on Nonlinear Systems, Member of IFAC's Policy Committee, Member of the IFAC Council and Chair of the Administration and Finance Committee. In addition he was Editor for IFAC's flagship journal Automatica for 13 years. In addition Frank also served the IEEE Control Systems Society as Vice-president for Technical Activities in 2013/14, was repeatedly a member of IEEE CSS Board of Governors, and has been the chairman of the CSS International Affairs Committee for 2007-2013. Furthermore he has been a member of the council of the European Union Control Association (EUCA) and a member of the Board of Governors of the VDI/VDE Society for Measurement and Automatic Control. Frank has been organizer or co-organizer of more than a dozen international conferences.

Prof. Keum-Shik Hong

Brain-Machine Interfaces: A Role of Control Engineers

Abstract Brain-computer/machine interface (BCI/BMI) provides a means of controlling machines and robots for locked-in people by interpreting the neuronal signals from the brain directly. Recently, researchers successfully trained people with head-implanted microelectrodes to control robotic and prosthetic arms. However, noninvasive methods are preferable to avoid the inherent medical risks in microelectrode implantation. Also, control engineers can find more roles in noninvasive methods. In this talk, the current BCI/BMI technologies are briefly overviewed: Various imaging techniques including invasive and noninvasive methods are discussed. Particularly, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) imaging will be the main focus, which is an emerging non-invasive brain imaging technique that measures the hemodynamic response of the cerebral cortex using near-infrared light (650-1,000 nm). The advantages of fNIRS are its low cost, portability, and a good temporal resolution than fMRI, as a plausible solution to real-time imaging. Recent research shows a great potential of fNIRS as a tool for BMI. Several examples of other BMI techniques are also illustrated. Finally, to discuss a role of control engineers in the coming elderly society, a feedback concept of brain therapy is introduced: The imaging devices (fNIRS, EEG, and fMRI) are considered as sensors, while the stimulation devices (tDCS/tACS, and rTMS) are considered as actuators. The advancements made to date in the field of electrical stimulation for the patients with mild cognitive impairment are discussed.

Biography Keum-Shik Hong received his B.S. degree in Mechanical Design and Production Engineering from Seoul National University in 1979, his M.S. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Columbia University, New York, in 1987, and both an M.S. degree in Applied Mathematics and a Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) in 1991. He joined the School of Mechanical Engineering at Pusan National University (PNU) in 1993. His Integrated Dynamics and Control Engineering Laboratory was designated a National Research Laboratory by the Ministry of Science and Technology of Korea in 2003. In 2009, under the auspices of the World Class University Program of the Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MEST) of Korea, he established the Department of Cogno-Mechatronics Engineering, PNU.

Dr. Hong served as Associate Editor of Automatica (2000-2006), as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Mechanical Science and Technology (2008-2011), and is serving as Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of Control, Automation, and Systems. He was a past President of the Institute of Control, Robotics and Systems (ICROS), Korea, and is President-Elect of Asian Control Association. He was the Organizing Chair of the ICROS-SICE International Joint Conference 2009, Fukuoka, Japan. He is an IEEE Fellow, a Fellow of the Korean Academy of Science and Technology, an ICROS Fellow, a Member of the National Academy of Engineering of Korea, and many other societies.

He has received many awards including the Best Paper Award from the KFSTS of Korea (1999), the F. Harashima Mechatronics Award (2003), the IJCAS Scientific Activity Award (2004), the Automatica Certificate of Outstanding Service (2006), the Presidential Award of Korea (2007), the ICROS Achievement Award (2009), the IJCAS Contribution Award (2010), the Premier Professor Award (2011), the JMST Contribution Award (2011), the IJCAS Contribution Award (2011), the IEEE Academic Award of ICROS (2016), etc. Dr. Hong's current research interests include brain-computer interface, nonlinear systems theory, adaptive control, distributed parameter systems, autonomous vehicles, and innovative control applications in brain engineering.

Prof. Jun-ichi Imura

Control of Large-Scale Network Systems for Societal System Design

Abstract Most of societal systems including power systems, urban traffic systems, gas systems, and water systems have various kinds of common properties such as scalability, hierarchy, interactivity, non-cooperativity, and resilience. Taking account of these properties, this talk discusses how we should make a mathematical model of such systems and design feedback controllers for them. First, we characterize a societal system such as a power system as a Cyber-Physical Value system, i.e., CPS having many and various players and various control inputs/sensors to achieve a certain specified purpose under super-scaled network structure composed of information, physical elements, and values with four requirements: (i) stability and balanced resource allocation, (ii) multi-value co-optimization, (iii) harmonized robustication, and (iv) open adaptation. In this characterization, we focus on two middle layers, that is, resource aggregation layer and prediction/control/market layer. The former is given as a middle layer between the operation layer and the user layer, while the latter corresponds to a cyber layer, regarded as a middle layer between the physical layer and the value layer. Second, based on this system structure, we introduce various modeling and control techniques including hierarchical network system modeling, risk management of prediction uncertainty, and a retrofitting technique for local controllers to achieve the above four requirements. The proposed approaches and techniques are applied to power grids under huge penetration of renewable energy such as photovoltaic power, and urban traffic systems under a mixed manual-automated traffic scenario.

Biography Jun-ichi Imura is a Professor of the Department of Systems and Control Engineering at Tokyo Institute of Technology. He is also Vice-President for Teaching and Learning at Tokyo Institute of Technology since 2018. He received the M.E. degree in Applied Systems Science, and the D.E. degree in Mechanical Engineering from Kyoto University, Japan, in 1990 and 1995, respectively. He served as a Research Associate at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Kyoto University from 1992 to 1996, and as an Associate Professor at Hiroshima University from 1996 to 2001. From 1998 to 1999 he was a visiting researcher at University of Twente, The Netherlands. Since 2001, he has been with Tokyo Institute of Technology.

His research interests include modeling, analysis, and control of hybrid systems, large-scale network systems, and nonlinear systems with applications to power grids, ITS, biological systems, industrial process systems, and so on. He co-authored 3 books (in Japanese) and over 70 international journal papers and over 150 international conference papers. He was a semi-plenary speaker of MTNS 2012 and a recipient of Best Paper Awards from SICE (1994, 2005, 2007, 2010) and from ISCIE (1991, 1998), etc.

He has served as an Member of IEEE CSS Board of Governors (2010, 2013, 2015-2017), IFAC Policy Committee (2014-), and IFAC Technical Board (2017-), and as Executive Director (General Affairs) of SICE (2011-2012) and General Chair of IFAC Conference on Analysis and Control of Chaotic Systems (2015). He is General Chair of IFAC World Congress 2023, and the PI of JST CREST project (2012-2020). He also has served as an Associate Editor of Automatica (2009-2017), Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (2011-2016), and IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control (2014-2016), and so on. He is a Fellow of SICE and a Senior Member of IEEE.