Learning to Control - Smart and Data-Driven Formal Methods for Cyber-Physical Systems control
The engineered systems surrounding us are increasingly hard to control. Not only the complicated interaction of the physical processes with the machines that control them, but also specifications (cyber-security, safety, privacy, resilience, resource-efficiency, decentralization) are more and more complex, and critical.
Last but not least, in an increasing number of situations, no model of the system is available (or the model is too complex), and one needs to ‘learn’ the optimal way of controlling the system by the mere observation of data. Our technological world is living a paradigm shift, which is often coined as the Cyber-Physical Revolution, or the Industry 4.0.
In view of these specificities, the only sensible way of controlling these complex systems is often by discretizing the different variables, thus transforming the model into a simple combinatorial problem on a finite-state automaton, called an abstraction of this system. Until now, this approach has not been proved useful beyond academic, small examples, as it scales very poorly.
The goal of L2C is to transform this approach into an effective, scalable, cutting-edge technology that will address the CPS challenges and unlock their potential.
This ambitious goal will be achieved by leveraging powerful tools from Mathematical Engineering. Out of this research, a state-of-the-art software platform will promote our results and translate them into directly usable solutions for the scientific and industrial communities.
L2C is a pluridisciplinary project at the frontier between Control Engineering, Computer Science and Applied Mathematics. It bridges the gap between rich innovative techniques and emerging challenges in Control. It impacts both fundamental Science and Engineering, as the theoretical research is driven and fostered by cutting edge technological challenges.
This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the grant agreement number 864017.