Thank you to Andreas A. Malikopoulos, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering, Cornell University, who presented Separation of Learning and Control in Emerging Mobility Systems at the Transportation Seminar on May 3, 2024.
Abstract: In this talk, I will discuss the challenges of supervised learning and model-based control approaches in transportation-related applications. Then, I will present a theoretical framework founded at the intersection of control theory and learning that circumvents these challenges in deriving optimal strategies. In this framework, we aim to identify a sufficient information state for the system that takes values in a time-invariant space and use this information state to derive separated control strategies. Separated control strategies are related to the concept of separation between the estimation of the information state and control of the system. By establishing separated control strategies, we can derive offline the optimal control strategy of the system with respect to the information state, which might not be precisely known, and then use learning methods to learn the information state online while data are added gradually to the system in real time.
Bio: Andreas Malikopoulos is a Professor in the School of Civil & Environmental Engineering and the Director of the Information and Decision Science Lab at Cornell University. Prior to these appointments, he was the Terri Connor Kelly and John Kelly Career Development Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (2017-2023) and the founding Director of the Sociotechnical Systems Center (2019-2023) at the University of Delaware (UD). Before he joined UD, he was the Alvin M. Weinberg Fellow (2010-2017) in the Energy & Transportation Science Division at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Deputy Director of the Urban Dynamics Institute (2014-2017) at ORNL, and a Senior Researcher in General Motors Global Research & Development (2008-2010).