NEWSLETTER

NEWSLETTER of the IEEE CSS TC on Hybrid Systems

Issue 6

Online version available at: http://hybrid-systems.ieeecss.org/tc-hybrid/newsletter-1

Summary of TC meeting at ACC 2019: 

The TC met at the ACC in Philadelphia and discussed current and future TC activities.  Below is a summary of the discussions.  Please contact the TC Chair if you want to participate in any of these activities.   The slides presented at the meeting are available at https://www.dropbox.com/s/4ahzllws2mkl6wc/201907-ACC-HybridSystemsTC.pdf?dl=0
 
  • The TC can request up to $3,000 from CSS for TC events that benefit CSS.  A 1-2 page proposal is required.  Please email ideas to the TC Chair anytime.
  • Please recommend TC members to join the CEB.  Please email nominations to the TC Chair by August 5.
  •  The TC on Heath Care and Medical Systems is interested in collaborating with our TC. If you have any research in such area, please contact the TC Chair.
  • At the TC meeting we discussed the need for articles highlighting the relevance of control theory that reach the broad community.  If you have ideas in how to do that by publishing in journals/magazines that are not within our community so that they can reach out to other disciplines (think of venues like Nature), please contact the TC Chair.
  • Please email information about announcements, awards, invited sessions, published articles you would like to highlight to me by October 1 so that we include them in the TC annual report.
  • At the TC meeting we discussed the idea of including recent publications about hybrid systems in the TC Newsletter.  If you know of an automated way to do that, please let the TC Chair know.
Thank you to all of the TC members who attended the meeting.
 

Conference Announcement:

The 13th International Conference on Reachability Problems takes place on September 11-13, 2019 in Brussels, Belgium.  The conference is focused on reachability problems, with specific emphasis on algebraic structures, automata theory and formal languages, computational game theory, concurrency and distributed computation, decision procedures in computational models, hybrid dynamical systems, and verification of finite and infinite-state systems.  

Important Dates:

Regular Papers

  • Submission deadline: June 17, 2019
  • Acceptance notification: July 12, 2019
  • Final version submission: July 16, 2019

Presentation-Only Papers

  • Abstracts submission: July 1, 2019
  • Acceptance notification: July 12, 2019

Registration

  • Early: August 15, 2019
  • Late: September 6, 2019

To submit, please visit: https://easychair.org/cfp/RP2019

Any questions should be addressed to the Organizing Committee:

Raphael Jungers, UCLouvain - raphael.jungers@uclouvain.be

Emmanual Fillot, FNRS, Universite libre de Bruxelles - efiliot@ulb.ac.be

Igor Potapov, University of Liverpool - potapov@liverpool.ac.uk

 

Pre-conference Workshop Announcement for 2019 IEEE Conference on Decision and Control

Model Predictive Control of Hybrid Dynamical Systems 

This one day workshop is a complete course on the analysis and design of model predictive control (MPC) schemes for hybrid dynamical systems. It presents recently developed results on asymptotically stabilizing MPC for hybrid systems based on control Lyapunov functions. The workshop provides a detailed overview of the literature and state-of-the-art on hybrid MPC, and a short tutorial on a powerful hybrid systems framework (hybrid inclusions) that can model hybrid dynamics described in other frameworks (e.g. switched systems, hybrid automata, impulsive systems). Key analysis tools for hybrid inclusions, along with several advantages over other frameworks are demonstrated. This background is then used to lay the theoretical foundations of a general MPC framework for hybrid systems, with guaranteed stability and feasibility.

The lectures are closely related to each other and are not meant to be independent research presentations. The main topics being covered are: 

  • Introduction to Hybrid Systems: Modeling, Basic Notions, and Application Examples
  • Background on Hybrid MPC and Overview of the Literature
  • Model Predictive Control for Hybrid Dynamical Systems: Recursive Feasibility, Value Function Properties, Lyapunov Stability Analysis.
  • Control Lyapunov Functions and Forward Invariance
  • Numerical Solutions and  Discretization
  • Further Results: Robustness, Optimal Control and Cost Evaluation, Estimation and Output Feedback, Safety and Learning

Further details can be found at: ​https://hybrid.soe.ucsc.edu/hybridmpccdc19

Course Instructors: 

  • Dr. Berk Altin  (organizer and presenter): Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Prof. Ricardo G. Sanfelice (organizer and presenter):  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Prof. Francesco Ferrante (presenter): GIPSA Lab,  Université Grenoble Alpes
  • Dr. Mohamed A. Maghenem (presenter): Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering,  Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz
  • Dr. Sean Phillips (presenter): Air Force Research Laboratory - Space Vehicles Directorate, Albuquerque, New Mexico

 

Workshop Announcement:

12th International Workshop on Numerical Software Verification

The main goal of the workshop was to focus on quantitative and qualitative analysis of hybrid systems, models and abstraction techniques, optimal control of dynamical systems, parameter identification for hybrid systems, numerical optimization methods.  The workshop also highlighted hybrid systems verification, applications of hybrid systems to systems biology, propagation of uncertainties, and deterministic and probabilistic models.

The workshop took place in New York, NY on July 13-14, 2019

Invited Speakers:

  • Calin Belta, Boston University, USA
  • Karl Henrik Johansson, KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden
  • Jehs Oehlerking, Robert Bosch GmbH, Germany
  • Martin Rinard, MIT, USA
Workshop website: http://nsv19.mpi-sws.org/
 
 
Research Project Announcement:

Open Positions in Tokyo: Formal Methods, Learning, and Cyber-Physical Systems

For our research project (ERATO MMSD, Metamathematics for
Systems Design) we are looking for senior researchers and postdocs
(10+ positions in total and some are still open), together with
research assistants (PhD students) and internship students.
The project runs until March 2022.
 
This broad project aims to extend the realm of formal methods from
software to cyber-physical systems (CPS), with particular emphases on logical/categorical metatheories and industrial application esp. in

automotive industry. 
 
In order to deal with the complexity of real-world cyber-physical systems, 

we need to rely on empirical, learning-based and data-driven measures for 
quality assurance (such as search-based testing). At the same
time, we are finding logical and automata-theoretic methods---the bedrock 

of formal verification and synthesis--playing pivotal roles also in those 
empirical quality assurance measures. This way, our
project offers an exciting scientific environment that mixes formal methods,
software engineering and machine learning. We also collaborate closely with https://www.autonomoose.net/, an automated driving project at Waterloo, Canada.

 
The following are prerequisites for application.
 
  • Your background in one of the following fields: formal methods, programming languages, control theory, control engineering, software science, software engineering, machine learning, numerical optimization, user interface, mathematical logic or category theory
  • Your willingness to dive into the heterogeneous (and thus exciting!) scientific environment as described in the above
 
For more about the project, including our recent activities and output, please visit
 
For more information about open positions, please visit:

 
 
Workshop Announcement:

Oded Maler Memorial Day, September 20, 2019, Grenoble, France

The laboratory VERIMAG is organizing a one-day scientific workshop on 20 September 2019 in Grenoble to celebrate the life and scientific legacy of Oded Maler, who sadly left us last year. 

The workshop will take place in Grenoble on September 20, 2019. A preliminary program is available at https://odedmalerday.sciencesconf.org/resource/page/id/2

This workshop is open to all and without registration fees; however, for organization purposes, the registration is mandatory. 

 
For more information please visit the page

 
 
Frontier Grant Announcement:
For those planning on submitting FRONTIER grants to CPS, an updated FAQ has been posted:

 
Frontier projects must address clearly identified critical CPS challenges that cannot be achieved by a set of smaller projects. Furthermore, Frontier projects should also look to push the boundaries of CPS well beyond today's systems and capabilities. 
 
Award amount: $1.2-7M for 4-5 years
FRONTIER Deadline: September 26 ** differs from SMALL and MEDIUM 
 
For more information, please consult the solicitation: