Einladung zum Vortrag im Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik

  Stability problems in human-in-the-loop control systems

Dr. Ketan Savla
Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
U.S.A

Tuesday, 13. July 2010, 4:00 p.m.
IST-Seminar-Room 3.243 · Pfaffenwaldring 9 · Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

Motivated by the indispensability of human involvement in many engineering applications, there is a continued growing interest in understanding systems with an integral human component. While disciplines such as human factors and social sciences provide a natural modeling ingredient for such systems, control design with such models remains a challenge.
In this talk, we design stabilizing controllers for two systems whose dynamics are governed primarily by human behavior. In the first part of the talk, we study the stability of a novel dynamical queue under task release control architecture. The server characteristics of this queue are motivated by well-known empirical laws describing human performance as a function of mental arousal. We propose a simple threshold-based task release control policy that ensures the stability of the queue for the maximum possible arrival rate.
In the second part of the talk, we consider a formulation of transportation networks where the dynamics is primarily governed by the node-wise route choice behavior of the drivers. In particular, we assume that the drivers have access only to location-specific traffic information as they transit through the network. We analyze the stability of such networks against malicious disruptions and characterize the class of route choice behaviors that render the maximum possible margin of stability to the network.

Biographical Information

Ketan Savla is a research scientist at the Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems at MIT. He obtained his Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and M.A. in Applied Mathematics, both in 2007, from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Prior to that, he received his M.S. in Mechanical Engineering from UIUC in 2004 and his B. Tech. in Mechanical Engineering from IIT Bombay in 2003. His primary research interests are in algorithmic mobile robotics, human-in-the-loop control systems and intelligent transportation systems.