Einladung zum Vortrag im Kolloquium Technische Kybernetik

  Information Based Control and Control Communication Complexity

Prof. Dr. John Baillieul
Department of Mechanical Engineering
Boston University, USA

Monday, 22. August 2011, 4:00 pm
IST-Seminar-Room 3.243 - Pfaffenwaldring 9 - Campus Stuttgart-Vaihingen

Abstract

The interaction of information and control has been a topic of interest to system theorists that can be traced back to the 1950’s when the fields of communications, control, and information theory were new but developing rapidly. Recent advances in our understanding of this interplay have emerged from work on the dynamical effect of state quantization and a corresponding understanding of how communication channel data rates affect system stability. While a large body of research has now emerged dealing with communication constrained feedback channels and optimal design of information flows in networks, less attention has been paid to ways in which control systems should be designed in order to optimally mediate computation and communication. Recently W.S. Wong has proposed the concept of control communication complexity (CCC) as a formal approach for understanding how a group of distributed agents can take independent actions that cooperatively realize common goals and objectives. A prototypical goal is the computation of a function, and CCC provides a promising new approach to understanding complexity in terms of the cost of information processing. This lecture will introduce control communication complexity in terms of what are called standard parts optimal control problems. Such optimization problems are of interest in the context of quantum computing, and similar problems have recently been discussed in connection with protocols for assembly of molecular components in synthetic biology.

Biographical Information

John Baillieul's research deals with robotics, the control of mechanical systems, and mathematical system theory. His PhD dissertation, completed at Harvard University under the direction of R.W. Brockett in 1975, was an early work dealing with connections between optimal control theory and what came to be called “sub-Riemannian geometry.” After publishing a number of papers developing geometric methods for nonlinear optimal control problems, he turned his attention to problems in the control of nonlinear systems modeled by homogeneous polynomial differential equations. Such systems describe, for example, the controlled dynamics of a rigid body. His main controllability theorem applied the concept of finiteness embodied in the Hilbert basis theorem to develop a controllability condition that could be verified by checking the rank of an explicit finite dimensional operator. Baillieul’s current research is aimed at understanding decision making and novel ways to communicate in mixed teams of humans and intelligent automata. John Baillieul is a Fellow of IFAC, a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of SIAM.