Operating dynamical systems at optimal setpoints constitutes one of the most central and relevant problems in systems and control theory. Recently, a new control paradigm called feedback optimization has shown promising results in addressing long-standing control problems and demonstrated outstanding performance in solving complex coordination problems in transportation and energy systems. According to this emerging paradigm, well-established optimization algorithms can be adapted to operate as feedback controllers. In this talk, I will present our recent research findings and performance bounds on feedback optimization. I will begin by reviewing a few classical techniques from numerical optimization and by showing how these can be translated to solve control problems. In the second part of the talk and motivated by the first, I will focus on optimization and control problems for dynamic systems whose dynamics are unknown, and where historical data is used to parametrize and predict system behavior. I will present conditions to guarantee that historical data is sufficiently informative for control design and I will demonstrate that stochastic optimization methods are amenable to control dynamical systems. While these results are relevant for a wide range of applications, a specific focus will be given to traffic management problems in transportation systems.

Gianluca Bianchin is an Assistant Professor in the ICTEAM Institute and Department of Mathematical Engineering at the Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium. He received the Doctor of Philosophy degree in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California Riverside in 2020, the Laurea degree in Information Engineering, and the Laurea Magistrale degree (Summa Cum Laude) in Controls Engineering from the University of Padova, Italy, in 2012 and 2014, respectively. He was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the ECEE Department at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2020 to 2022. In 2018 he joined the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory as a Graduate Intern and in 2019 the Bosch Research Center as a Research Intern. Prof. Bianchin is the recipient of the Dissertation Year Award and the Dean’s Distinguished Fellowship Award from the University of California Riverside; his work on secure navigation was the Elsevier Journal of Automatica Editor’s choice of the month in February 2020. His research interests include dynamical systems and control theory and their applications in traffic control and complex network control.

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