Electrical Engineering Department’s Associate Professor James Anderson and his collaborators have been recognized with the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems (TCNS) Outstanding Paper Award for their pioneering research paper “Distributed and Localized Model Predictive Control—Part II: Theoretical Guarantees.”
The prestigious award was presented in December during the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control held in Milan, Italy. The award celebrates papers published in TCNS over the past two years, highlighting exceptional contributions based on originality, relevance, clarity, and impact on control systems technology.
“It’s a real honor to win the award,” said Anderson. “This paper is just one piece of a much broader body of work that we have been developing for the last five or so years. So it’s great to get such positive feedback on what we’re doing.”
Model predictive control (MPC) is a fundamental technique for optimizing performance and providing safety guarantees to dynamical systems such as robots and aircrafts. The downside of MPC is that it is often computationally intractable to deploy to large, complex systems. This research develops new theory and computational tools that allow MPC to be deployed to massive-scale networks and cyberphysical systems such as swarms of drones and smart grids. Revolutionizing Control Systems with Scalability, Robustness and Performance Guarantees
Cyberphysical systems—spanning power networks, transportation systems, and robotics—are growing increasingly large and complex, making them difficult to operate and control. To address this, Anderson and his collaborators developed a Distributed and Localized Model Predictive Control (DLMPC) framework that allows for:
- Localized Information Sharing: Subsystems and controllers exchange only local data to compute optimal policies, minimizing global complexity.
- Robust Guarantees: The framework ensures recursive feasibility and asymptotic stability, even in the presence of noise.
- Scalability: Computational complexity is independent of global system size, making it applicable to large-scale networks.
This innovative approach represents the first distributed MPC scheme offering minimally conservative yet fully distributed guarantees for both nominal and robust control settings.
The award cements Anderson’s reputation as a leader in the field of control systems, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in scalable, distributed control solutions.
