Abstract: Many large scale systems involve the interaction of a number of agents with loosely coupled dynamics and decisions. Examples include transportation systems, consumer demand response in electricity grids, emergency evacuation of buildings, and even education. In all these cases agents locally optimize their decisions, but their eventual well being depends on the decisions of all other agents. For such systems it is typically impractical to impose a centralized control structure for a number of reasons, including computational and communication limitations and privacy concerns. Instead one can consider providing suitable information to the agents and imposing an appropriate penalty/reward scheme to steer the overall population using macroscopic commands, so that it exhibits a desirable macroscopic behaviour. In this talk we will discuss how such control structures can be developed by adopting a mean field control perspective, based on convergence results in operator theory. The discussion will be motivated by applications of population control to consumer electricity demand response schemes.

Bio: John Lygeros completed a B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering in 1990 and an M.Sc. degree in Systems Control in 1991, both at Imperial College of Science Technology and Medicine, London, U.K.. In 1996 he obtained a Ph.D. degree from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department, University of California, Berkeley. During the period 1996-2000 he held a series of research appointments at the National Automated Highway Systems Consortium, Berkeley, the Laboratory for Computer Science, M.I.T., and the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at U.C. Berkeley. Between 2000 and 2003 he was a University Lecturer at the Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge, U.K., and a Fellow of Churchill College. Between 2003 and 2006 he was an Assistant Professor at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Patras, Greece. In July 2006 he joined the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zurich, first as an Associate Professor, and since January 2010 as a Full Professor; he is currently serving as the Head of the laboratory and the head of the Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering. His research interests include modelling, analysis, and control of hierarchical, hybrid, and stochastic systems, with applications to biochemical networks, automated highway systems, air traffic management, power grids and camera networks. John Lygeros is a Fellow of the IEEE, and a member of the IET and the Technical Chamber of Greece.