Workshop on Robust Control

IPAM at UCLA, April 2002

The invited speakers so far are

• Jaime Peraire (large scale CFD & robustness)
• Cindy Barnhart (transportation networks)
• Fernando Paganini, Stephen Low (networks)
• John Doyle
• Eric Feron
• Munzer Dahleh, Jorge Goncalves

 

Robustness, verifiability, and convergence.  Interaction with transportation, energy, supply chain, and other engineering networks in addition to convergence of communication and computing networks.  Issues are how to build large complex engineering networks that are robust, scalable, verifiable, evolvable.  What new issues arise as communications/computing networks becomes more embedded and ubiquitous within the other engineering networks.

We plan to address the following areas:

1) Future ubiquitous ad hoc embedded networks of communication, computing, control, transportation, sensors, energy, finance, manufacturing, supply chain, etc.

2) "postgenomics" biological networks focusing on the dynamic and distributed nature (as opposed to the genomic view of parts catalogs and maybe topological connectivity but no dynamics).

3) Connections of systems level with physical substrated in molecular biology of the cell and "nanosystems" : in both cases large complex systems are built very close to or immediately on the molecular level.

The goal is to show that these areas have much more in common than most realize.  The big issue is robustness and reliability, particularly to cascading failure events.