Each seminar highlights a different speaker who will discuss their latest research projects, cutting-edge technology or what is happening within certain technological industries. These industries include biomedical technologies or microsystems, assistive technologies, automation and intelligent systems, unmanned systems, advanced manufacturing and composite materials.
Topic:
Attack Detection & Mitigation for Control Systems
Abstract:
It used to be that in order to poison the waterhole, you needed to be at the waterhole. Likewise, guarding the well involved asking a person to watch out for bandits. Now, the city water supply can be attacked by a hacker with a laptop on the other side of the world. The same is true for most of our critical infrastructures such as water, power, fossil fuel refining and pipeline transmission as well as large segments of industry that include chemical processing, robotic assembly, and other forms of automation. While the modernization of control processes has led to unprecedented levels of productivity and efficiency, the coupling of the physical processes with an overarching cyber communication control layer opens up new vulnerabilities for such so called cyber-physical systems. In this presentation I will describe the perspective we take on attack detection and mitigation, which is a rigorous approach to balancing detection sensitivity with a practical level of false alarms. This rigorous approach enables quantifying the potential impact of attackers that wish to remain undetected as well as designing control systems to be less vulnerable to such attacks.
Bio:
Dr. Ruths received a B.S. in Physics from Rice University, M.S. degrees in Mechanical Engineering (Columbia University) and Electrical Engineering (Washington University in Saint Louis), and a Ph.D. in Systems Science and Applied Mathematics from Washington University in Saint Louis. In 2011, Dr. Ruths joined Singapore University of Technology and Design as a founding faculty member where he served as an assistant professor in Engineering Systems and Design for five years. As of August 2016 he is an assistant professor with appointments in Mechanical Engineering and Systems Engineering at University of Texas at Dallas. His research includes studying the fundamental properties of controlling networks, bilinear systems theory, security of cyber-physical control systems, and solving computational optimal control problems focused on neuroscience and quantum control applications.
Topic:
Set-based Hierarchical Model Predictive Control
Abstract:
Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a leading approach for the control of constrained systems, where input and state constraints are directly imposed in the underlying optimization problem. Guaranteed constraint satisfaction and stability of the closed-loop system are well understood for the case of a single centralized controller. When the complexity of a system prohibits a centralized control approach, hierarchical MPC can be used to decompose control decisions across multiple levels of controllers. However, with a complex network of interacting MPC controllers operating at different timescales, it becomes very challenging to design each individual controller such that constraint satisfaction and stability of the overall closed-loop system can be guaranteed.
This talk presents how set-based coordination mechanisms can be used within a hierarchical MPC framework to provide guaranteed feasibility of each controller in the hierarchy and the satisfaction of state and input constraints for the closed-loop system. In particular, it will be shown how the unique features of zonotope and constrained zonotope set representations are key enablers of the proposed set-based coordination mechanisms. Several numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the key features, performance, and scalability of the set-based hierarchical MPC approach.
Bio:
Justin Koeln received his B.S. degree in 2011 from Utah State University in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering. He received M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in 2013 and 2016, respectively, from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign in Mechanical Science and Engineering. He is an Assistant Professor at the University of Texas at Dallas in the Mechanical Engineering Department. He was a NSF Graduate Research Fellow and a Summer Faculty Fellow with the Air Force Research Laboratory. His research interests include dynamic modeling and control of thermal management systems, model predictive control, and hierarchical and distributed control for electro-thermal systems.
Date:
Friday, October 1, 2021
Time:
12pm-1pm
Location: