NMPC 2018 - Plenary Speakers

Plenary Speakers

Name	Affiliation	Tentative Title
Lorenz Biegler	Carnegie Mellon University (US)	Nonlinear Optimization for Model Predictive Control
Francesco Borrelli	University of California, Berkeley (US)	Learning MPC in Autonomous Systems
Stefano Di Cairano	Mitsubishi Electric Research (US, Industry)
Ilya Kolmanovsky	University of Michigan (US)	Drift Counteraction and Control of Underactuated Systems: What MPC has to offer?
Jan Maciejowski	University of Cambridge (UK)	Uses and abuses of Nonlinear MPC
Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate	École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland)	Scalable fault-tolerant control for cyberphysical systems
Stephen Wright	University of Wisconsin-Madison (US)	Optimization and MPC: Some Recent Developments

Lorenz T. Biegler

Carnegie Mellon University

Lorenz T. (Larry) Biegler is the Head and Bayer University Professor of Chemical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests lie in computer aided process engineering (CAPE) and include flowsheet optimization, optimization of systems of differential and algebraic equations, reactor network synthesis and algorithms for constrained, nonlinear process control. Contributions in these areas include analysis and development of nonlinear programming algorithms, optimization software design and application to real-world chemical processes and energy systems.

He is an author on over 400 archival publications and 2 textbooks, has edited nine technical books and given numerous invited presentations at national and international conferences. His awards include the Lewis Award, Walker Award and Computers in Chemical Engineering Award, given by AIChE, the Lectureship Award, Curtis McGraw Research Award and CACHE Computing Award, given by ASEE, the INFORMS Computing Prize, and an honorary doctorate in engineering sciences from the Technical University of Berlin. He is a Fellow of AIChE and SIAM, and a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Francesco Borrelli

University of California, Berkeley

Francesco Borrelli received the `Laurea' degree in computer science engineering in 1998 from the University of Naples `Federico II', Italy. In 2002 he received the PhD from the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH-Zurich, Switzerland. He is currently a Professor at the Department of Mechanical Engineering of the University of California at Berkeley, USA. He is the author of more than one hundred publications in the field of predictive control. He is author of the book Predictive Control published by Cambridge University Press, the winner of the 2009 NSF CAREER Award and the winner of the 2012 IEEE Control System Technology Award. In 2016 he was elected IEEE fellow. In 2017 he was awarded the Industrial Achievement Award by the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Council.

Since 2004 he has served as a consultant for major international corporations. He was the founder and CTO of BrightBox Technologies Inc, a company focused on cloud-computing optimization for autonomous systems. He is the co-director of the Hyundai Center of Excellence in Integrated Vehicle Safety Systems and Control at UC Berkeley. He is the CTO of software of NEXTracker, Inc, the world leader company in photovoltaic trackers.

His research interest are in the area of model predictive control and its application to automated driving and energy systems.

Stefano Di Cairano

Mitsubishi Electric Research

Stefano Di Cairano received the PhD in Information Engineering from the University of Siena, Italy, in 2008. He was a visiting student at the Technical University of Denmark and at the California Institute of Technology. From 2008 he was with Powertrain Control R&A;, Ford Motor Co.

Since 2011 he is with Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories, where he leads the optimization-based control team focusing on systems with a high degree of autonomy, in automotive, aerospace, factory automation, and transportation.

He is an author in more than 130 publications, an inventor in more than 25 patents, and received several Mitsubishi Electric internal awards for contributions to controls, mechatronics and automotive.

His research interests include model predictive control, constrained control, hybrid systems, optimization, and particle filtering.

Ilya Kolmanovsky

University of Michigan

Dr. Ilya Kolmanovsky has received his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in aerospace engineering, and the M.A. degree in mathematics from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, in 1993, 1995, and 1995, respectively. He is presently a full professor in the department of aerospace engineering at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan. His research interests are in control theory for systems with state and control constraints, and in control applications to aerospace and automotive systems.

Before joining the University of Michigan as a faculty, Dr. Kolmanovsky has been with Ford Research and Advanced Engineering (R&AE;) in Dearborn, Michigan, for close to 15 years, where the focus of his research has been on advanced control of engines and powertrain systems to improve their energy efficiency, emissions and performance. From 2002 to 2009 he has been leading research groups “Electronic Valve Actuation Engine Controls,” “Electronic Valve Actuation and Variable Displacement Engine Controls,” and “Modern Control Methods and Computational Intelligence” at Ford R&AE.;
Dr. Kolmanovsky is a Fellow of IEEE, a past recipient of the Donald P. Eckman Award of American Automatic Control Council, of two IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology Outstanding Paper Awards, and of several awards of Ford Research and Advanced Engineering. He has been ASEE Summer Faculty Fellow at Space Vehicles Directorate of Air Force Research Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the summers of 2011 and 2012. He is named as an inventor on 98 United States patents.

Jan Maciejowski

University of Cambridge

Jan Maciejowski is a Professor of Control Engineering at Cambridge, now partly retired. He is also the President and a Fellow of Pembroke College, Cambridge, and currently a Visiting Professor at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. He is one of the Principal Investigators in the Cambridge CARES project, tasked with reducing the carbon footprint of Singapore.

From 2009 to 2014 he was the Head of the Information Engineering Division at Cambridge University. He was the President of the European Union Control Association from 2003 to 2005, and was President of the Institute of Measurement and Control for 2002. He is a Chartered Engineer and a Fellow of the Institution of Engineering and Technology (IET), the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the Institute of Measurement and Control (InstMC), and of the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC). He was a Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Control Systems Society from 2001 to 2007.

His research interests have included multivariable control, system modelling and identification, model predictive control, fault-tolerant control, and machine learning for control. His work on applications has mostly been for aerospace, but he is currently interested in applying model predictive control for smart energy generation and consumption. He has published two prize-winning textbooks, Multivariable Feedback Design (Addison-Wesley 1989) and Predictive Control: with Constraints (Prentice-Hall, 2002).

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate

École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate received the Ph.D. degree in Electronic and Computer Engineering from the Universita' degli Studi di Pavia in 1999. Since September 2016 he is Professor at EPFL, Lausanne, Switzerland. In spring 1998, he was a Visiting Researcher at the Neural Computing Research Group, University of Birmingham, UK. In fall 1998, he joined as a Postdoctoral Fellow the Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH, Zurich, Switzerland. He was appointed Oberassistent at ETH, in 2000. In 2002, he joined INRIA, Rocquencourt, France, as a Research Fellow. From March to October 2005, he was researcher at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. From 2005 to August 2016, he was Associate Professor at the Dipartimento di Ingegneria Industriale e dell'Informazione of the Universita' degli Studi di Pavia.

His research interests include scalable control, microgrids, networked control systems, hybrid systems and machine learning.

Giancarlo Ferrari Trecate was the recipient of the Researcher Mobility Grant from the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research in 2005. He is currently a member of the IFAC Technical Committee on Control Design, the Technical Committee on Systems Biology of the IEEE SMC society and he is member of the editorial board of Automatica and Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems.

Stephen Wright

University of Wisconsin-Madison

Stephen J. Wright holds the George B. Dantzig Professorship, the Sheldon Lubar Chair, and the Amar and Balinder Sohi Professorship of Computer Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His researchis in computational optimization and its applications to many areas of science and engineering. Prior to joining UW-Madison in 2001, Wright held positions at North Carolina State University (1986-90), Argonne National Laboratory (1990-2001), and the University of Chicago (2000-2001). He has served as Chair of the Mathematical Optimization Society and as a Trustee of SIAM. He is a Fellow of SIAM. In 2014, he won the W.R.G. Baker Award from IEEE.

Wright is the author / coauthor of widely used text and reference books in optimization including "Primal Dual Interior-Point Methods" and "Numerical Optimization". He has published widely on optimization theory, algorithms, software, and applications.

Wright is current editor-in-chief of the SIAM Journal on Optimization and previously served as associate editor or editor-in-chief of Mathematical Programming (Series A), Mathematical Programming (Series B), SIAM Review, SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and several other journals and book series.