Speaker: Rami Katz
September 17th, 2026 | 11:30 am
DEIB, Beta Room (Bld. 24)
Contact: Prof. Gian Paolo Incremona
Abstract
On September 17th, 2026, at 11:30 am the seminar on "On algorithms for optimal control of time-delay systems and their applications to epidemiological models" will take place in DEIB Beta Room (Building 24).Optimal control is a widely used approach for controller synthesis in numerous disciplines, including epidemiology (intervention policies), biological engineering and synthetic biology (design of bio-molecular circuits), aerospace engineering (trajectory optimization) and robotics and automation (motion planning). In such applications, dynamical models that account for delays in the evolution of the system (i.e. time-delay systems - TDSs) are ubiquitous; for example, an epidemiological model can take into account the incubation period of a disease. Compared to regular ODEs, optimal control of TDSs imposes significant additional challenges in synthesizing controllers and designing reliable algorithms with theoretical guarantees to identify optimal controllers. In this talk, I will first present the general problem of optimal control of TDSs and discuss some of its analogies with the problem of minimizing functions. Then, I will present a recently developed sequential algorithm for optimal control of TDSs, and discuss its guarantees. Finally, I will show numerical simulations that demonstrate the efficacy of the algorithm in solving problems emanating from mathematical epidemiology.