LIDS Seminar Series

Monday, November 18, 2024 - 4:00pm

Event Calendar Category

LIDS Seminar Series

Speaker Name

Bassam Bamieh

Affiliation

UC Santa Barbara

Building and Room Number

32-155

“Architectural Questions in Distributed Systems and Controls”

In the design and control of large-scale distributed systems, architectural considerations are arguably some of the most important ones. These include local versus global feedback in multi-agent systems, sensor and actuator placement in distributed control of PDEs, how far should sensor information travel in distributed controller architecture, the structure and realization of distributed controllers, and many other related issues. Many of these questions have significant implications for plant and system co-design, which are perhaps even more important than controller design itself; an observation that is perhaps being overlooked in this era of data-driven methods. We survey some of these questions using specific case studies to point out the role of optimal and robust control in determining limits of performance, which in turn inform controller and distributed system architecture motifs. The case studies will evoke more questions than answers, indicating the need for a more developed theory of distributed systems and controls architecture.

Bassam Bamieh is Professor of Mechanical Engineering at the University of California at Santa Barbara (UCSB). He received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering and Physics from Valparaiso University (Valparaiso, IN) in 1983, and his M.Sc. and PhD degrees in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Rice University in 1986 and 1992 respectively. Prior to joining UCSB in 1998, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and the Coordinated Science Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (1991-98). His research interests include robust and pptimal Control, distributed and networked control and dynamical systems, shear flow transition and turbulence, quantum control, and thermoacoustics. His recognitions include the IEEE Control Systems Society G. S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award (twice), an AACC Hugo Schuck Best Paper Award, and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. He is a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC), and a Fellow of the IEEE.

The Fall 2024 LIDS Seminar Series is curated by Navid Azizan with support from Jin Gao, Shyla Putrevu, and Jerard Welcome.