Seminar 1: BrIAS Fellow Prof. Antonella Ferrara
Traffic control for freeway networks and sustainability-related objectives
The impact of successful research in road traffic control spans across various domains, including the scientific, technological, social, and economic spheres. Its significance is profound, as it directly influences safety, quality of life, climate neutrality, energy resource utilization, and transportation costs. However, the development of effective methods and algorithms for road traffic management encounters notable methodological challenges. Traditionally, traffic control strategies have relied on infrastructure-based approaches. Yet, the rapid advancements in automotive technologies, traffic sensors, data processing, and communication have created unprecedented opportunities for the exploitation of an advanced type of vehicles, called connected and automated vehicles (CAVs), offering innovative solutions to longstanding traffic control challenges. This talk will address these challenges and advancements, beginning with an overview of classical traffic control concepts. It will then focus on emerging research trends that exploit the multi-scale nature of traffic systems, from the microscopic scale of the individual CAV to the macroscopic scale of the traffic flow. Furthermore, it will illustrate how these aspects can efficiently coexist within an advanced vehicular traffic control system that optimizes the traffic throughput and mitigates the environmental impact.
Seminar 2: Prof. Rodolphe Sepulchre
Regulation without calibration
Abstract: Regulation theory is grounded in the internal model principle, which states that exact regulation requires an exact internal model of the external signals to be regulated. How to reconcile this calibration principle with systems made of uncertain and variable components ? How do animals achieve regulation in changing and complex environments? The talk will propose that reliable regulation is possible in uncertain machines that regulate events rather than trajectories. I will highlight the role of excitability and synaptic coupling in a theory of event regulation.
Bio: Rodolphe Sepulchre is Professor of Engineering at the KU Leuven (Belgium) and at the University of Cambridge (UK). He is a fellow of IFAC (2020), IEEE (2009), and SIAM (2015). He received the IEEE CSS Antonio RubertiYoung Researcher Prize in 2008 and the IEEE CSS George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award in2020. He was elected at the Royal Academy of Belgium in 2013. He has been Editor-in-Chief of Systems and Control Lettters (2009-2019) and
the IEEE Control Systems Magazine (2020-2024). He is a recipient of two ERC advanced grants
(Switchlets (2015-2021) and SpikyControl (2023-2028)).
Traffic control for freeway networks and sustainability-related objectives
