IAS Distinguished Lecture

Cyber-physical Systems: Why Connecting the Physical World?

Abstract

Cyber-physical systems are engineered systems whose operations are monitored, controlled, and integrated by computing and communication components interacting with the physical environment. Cyber-physical systems transform how we interact with the physical world just like the Internet has transformed how we interact with one another. Advances in this field will have an enormous societal impact and economic benefit in areas such as energy, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture and many more. The aim of this lecture is to provide a window into the recent developments of the fundamentals and applications of control of cyber-physical systems. The speaker will discuss various opportunities and challenges regarding modeling, optimization, and coordination of these systems. He will illustrate the potentials with an application to goods transportation, where he will show how modern information and communication technology supports a novel cyber-physical transport architecture with an integrated logistic system coordinating fleets of trucks traveling together in vehicle platoons. The lecture will end with a discussion on some open cross-disciplinary research problems.


About the speaker

Prof. Karl Henrik Johansson received his MSc degree in Electrical Engineering and PhD degree in Automatic Control from Lund University. He has held visiting positions at the University of California at Berkeley (1998-2000) and California Institute of Technology (2006-2007); and a six-year Senior Researcher position with the Swedish Research Council (2006-2011). He is currently the Director of the ACCESS Linnaeus Centre and Professor of Electrical Engineering at KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. He is also a Wallenberg Scholar and heading the Stockholm Strategic Research Area ICT The Next Generation.

Prof. Johansson’s research interests are in networked control systems, cyber-physical systems, and applications in transportation, energy, and automation systems. He has been a member of the IEEE Control Systems Society Board of Governors and the Chair of the IFAC Technical Committee on Networked Systems. He has been on the Editorial Boards of several journals, including Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, and IET Control Theory and Applications.

Prof. Johansson is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and the Editorial Board member of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and the European Journal of Control. He received the Best Paper Award of the IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems in 2009 and the Best Theory Paper Award of the World Congress on Intelligent Control and Automation in 2014.

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