Taming Large Scale Control Problems with Compositional and Hierarchical Approaches

Abstract

Existing control design and verification methods are limited in their ability to address large numbers of interacting agents, multiple layers of feedback, and complex system-level requirements. This talk will demonstrate a strategy for overcoming this limitation with compositional and hierarchical approaches. The compositional approach exposes a complex system as an interconnection of smaller subsystems and derives system-level guarantees from subsystem properties. The hierarchical approach decomposes the synthesis and verification tasks into layers, from high-level decision making to low-level control synthesis. Taken together, these approaches break apart intractably large design and verification problems into subproblems of manageable size. In addition to broadly applicable methodology, the talk will present numerous motivating applications and experimental results, involving multicellular biological systems, fleets of autonomous vehicles, and a multiscale traffic management system.