The Department of Automatic Control and Systems Engineering are delighted to host the 11th Harry Nicholson Lecture in Control Engineering which will be delivered by our distinguished guest, Professor Anders Rantzer who will be presenting a lecture with the title: 

Towards Optimal and Adaptive Control for Large-scale Systems

The lecture will take place on Tuesday 20 June 2023 beginning at 3:00pm in Mappin Hall, Sir Frederick Mappin Building and will be followed by a drinks reception.

Abstract

Classical control theory does not scale well for large systems like traffic networks, power networks and chemical reaction networks. To change this situation, new approaches need to be developed, not only for analysis and synthesis of controllers, but also for modelling and verification.

In this lecture we will present some classes of networked control problems for which scalable distributed controllers can be optimised efficiently. Moreover, we will discuss how the lack of accurate models can be addressed using new methods for minimax adaptive control with provable robustness bounds for the closed loop system, including the nonlinear learning procedure.

Biography

Anders Rantzer was appointed professor of Automatic Control at Lund University, Sweden, after a PhD at KTH Stockholm in 1991 and a postdoc 1992/93 at IMA, University of Minnesota. The academic year of 2004/05 he was visiting associate faculty member at Caltech and 2015/16 he was Taylor Family Distinguished Visiting Professor at University of Minnesota.

Rantzer is a Fellow of IEEE, member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences, Royal Physiographic Society in Lund and former chairman of the Swedish Scientific Council for Natural and Engineering Sciences.  His research interests are in modelling, analysis and synthesis of control systems, with particular attention to scalability, adaptation and applications in energy networks.