The School of Electrical and Electronic Engineering are delighted to be hosting the 13th Harry Nicholson Lecture in Control Engineering which will be delivered by our distinguished guest, Professor Frank Allgöwer.
The lecture, titled, 'Exploring the Frontiers of Model Predictive Control: Data-Driven Methods and Theoretical Foundations' will take place on Wednesday 24 September beginning at 15:00 in Mappin Hall, Sir Frederick Mappin Building and will be followed by a reception.
Recent years have shown rapid progress of learning-based and data-driven methods, significantly impacting the field of control, including model predictive control (MPC). In addition to numerous methodological and computational advancements, a substantial number of application studies featuring data- and learning-based MPC are currently being published.
In this talk, we will compare model-based and data-based MPC to explore which holds more potential for future impact. Highlighting recent developments, we will focus on two different data-based MPC schemes: one based on the Fundamental Lemma of Willems et al., and the other on the data-informativity paradigm. By providing an overview and introduction to these methods, we will discuss their theoretical properties, suitability for nonlinear systems, and demonstrate their advantages and limitations compared to model-based MPC through various application examples.
This critical analysis and comparison aims to offer insights and recommendations for future research directions in the evolving domain of MPC.
Frank Allgöwer is Director of the Institute for Systems Theory and Automatic Control at the University of Stuttgart. He is a member of selected academic and university bodies as well as national and international organisations, as well as being the publisher and co-publisher of a range of international journals. He has been Vice-President of the German Research Foundation (DFG) from 2012 to 2020, Vice-President of the IEEE Control Systems Society from 2013 to 2014 and Chairman of the VDI-GMA Division for Principles and Methods since 2000. He has received various awards, including the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the German Research Foundation (DFG) in 2004, the Teaching Prize of the State of Baden-Württemberg (2007) and the IFAC Outstanding Service Award of the International Federation of Automatic Control in 2011.
In 2022, the German Research Foundation awarded Prof. Frank Allgöwer one of the rare Reinhart Koselleck grants. The goal of his project is to develop a new, unified control theory that combines data and models without the need for mathematical system models. This would be the basis for a completely new control theory that promises simpler and more cost-effective applications, for example in manufacturing, digitisation or autonomous vehicles.
To register your place, please visit the following webpage.