AAI-CCI-MHI Seminar on CPS, Wed., April. 10, 2:00 pm, EEB 248: Gioele Zardini

Speaker: Gioele Zardini, Postdoctoral Researcher

Talk Title: Co-Design of Complex Systems: From Autonomy to Future Mobility

Abstract: When designing complex systems, we need to consider multiple trade-offs at various abstraction levels and scales, and choices of single components need to be studied jointly. For instance, the design of future mobility solutions (e.g., autonomous vehicles, micromobility) and the design of the mobility systems they enable are closely coupled. Indeed, knowledge about the intended service of novel mobility solutions would impact their design and deployment process, while insights about their technological development could significantly affect transportation management policies. Optimally co-designing sociotechnical systems is a complex task for at least two reasons. On one hand, the co-design of interconnected systems (e.g., large networks of cyber-physical systems) involves the simultaneous choice of components arising from heterogeneous natures (e.g., hardware vs. software parts) and fields, while satisfying systemic constraints and accounting for multiple objectives. On the other hand, components are connected via collaborative and conflicting interactions between different stakeholders (e.g., within an intermodal mobility system). In this talk, I will present a framework to co-design complex systems, leveraging a monotone theory of co-design and tools from game theory. The framework will be instantiated in the task of designing future mobility systems, all the way from the policies that a city can design, to the autonomy of vehicles as part of an autonomous mobility-on-demand service. Through various case studies, I will show how the proposed approaches allow one to efficiently answer heterogeneous questions, unifying different modeling techniques and promoting interdisciplinarity, modularity, and compositionality. I will then discuss open challenges for compositional systems design optimization, and present my agenda to tackle them.  

Biography: Gioele Zardini is a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics at Stanford University and an incoming faculty at MIT in Fall 2024.  He received his BSc., MSc., and Ph.D. in Mechanical Engineering with a focus on Robotics, Systems, and Control from ETH Zurich in 2017, 2019, and 2023 respectively. He spent time in Singapore as a researcher at nuTonomy (then Aptiv, now Motional), at Stanford University (working with Marco Pavone), and at MIT (in 2020 working with David Spivak, and in 2023 with Munther Dahleh).  Driven by societal challenges, the goal of his research is to develop efficient computational tools and algorithmic approaches to formulate and solve complex, interconnected system design and autonomous decision-making problems. His research interests include the co-design of sociotechnical systems, compositionality in engineering, applied category theory, decision and control, optimization, and game theory, with applications to intelligent transportation systems, autonomy, and complex networks and infrastructures. He is the creator of Autonomy Talks (an International seminar series promoting a diverse research exchange on autonomy), as well as a lead organizer for the seminal workshops “Compositional Robotics: Mathematics and Tools”, and “Co-Design and Coordination of Future Mobility Systems” at IEEE ICRA and ITSC, respectively. He is the recipient of a paper award at the 4th Applied Category Theory Conference and of the Best Paper Award (1st Place) at the 24th IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC). For more details, check out his webpage: https://gioele.science

Host: Pierluigi Nuzzo

Location: 248

Audiences: Everyone Is Invited

Contact: Ariana Perez