Date and time: Thursday 22 May 2025, 14:00-15:00 CEST
Speaker: Gianluca Bianchin, University of Louvain, Belgium
Title: Optimization for Highly Dynamic Transportation Systems via the Internal Model Principle
Where: Malvinas väg 10, floor 7, Harry Nyquist room (20 seats), KTH main campus OR Zoom
Zoom: https://kth-se.zoom.us/j/61952276888?from=addon
Host: Giuseppe Belgioioso, giubel@kth.se
Bio: Gianluca Bianchin is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Engineering and ICTEAM Institute at the University of Louvain (UCLouvain), Belgium. He received the Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of California Riverside in 2020. He previously obtained both his M.Sc. degree in Controls Engineering (Summa Cum Laude, 2014) and his B.Sc. degree in Information Engineering (2012) from the University of Padua, Italy.
Dr. Bianchin was a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Energy Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder from 2020 to 2022. He has also spent time as a visiting researcher at the Bosch Research and Technology Center North America and at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. Prof. Bianchin received the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems Best Paper Award in 2023 and the Dissertation Year Award from the University of California, Riverside, in 2019. Additionally, his research on secure robotic navigation was selected as the Editor’s Choice of the Month by the Elsevier journal Automatica in February 2020. His research interests include dynamical systems, control theory, and algorithmic optimization and their applications in traffic control and network infrastructures (such as power networks and sociotechnical networks).
Prof. Gianluca Bianchin (UC Louvain) is currently visiting DCS as a Digital Futures Summer Early Career (SEC) scholar. He has some exciting works on feedback optimization, data-driven control, and beyond. Check out his website https://gianlucabi.github.io/ for more details about this research. If you’d like to connect, feel free to get in touch at gianluca.bianchin@uclouvain.be. He’ll be around until mid June.
Abstract: Transportation systems are essential components of modern societies, enabling the movement of people, goods, and services across regions. Transforming transportation and making it more sustainable are critical needs for a green transition: today, transport accounts for nearly 25% of Europe’s greenhouse gas emissions, which the EU aims to cut by 90% before 2050. Ensuring efficiency and sustainability of transport networks amounts to finding effective ways to optimize these systems when operating in highly-dynamic conditions.
In this talk, I will show how tools from online optimization can be adapted to address long-standing traffic congestion problems. Particular focus will be given to dynamic settings, where optimization objectives as well as the systems to optimize evolve with time. To address these problems, I will take a control-systems perspective to algorithmic optimization, and present the internal model principle of time-varying optimization, stating that an optimization algorithm can reach exact optimality if and only if it incorporates some model of the temporal variability of the problem. While these results are relevant for a wide range of applications, specific focus will be given to traffic management problems in transportation systems with humans-in-the-loop.
