Samira El Yacoubi

Franco Bagnoli, Sara Dridi, Bassem Sellami et al.

In mathematics and engineering, control theory is concerned with the analysis of dynamical systems through the application of suitable control inputs. One of the prominent problems in control theory is controllability which concerns the ability to determine whether there exists a control input that can steer a dynamical system from an initial state to a desired final state within a finite time horizon. There is a general theory for controlling linear or linearizable system, but it cannot be applied to discrete systems like cellular automata, which is the problem of that we address in this paper. We develop a general theory for linear (and affine) cellular automata, and apply it to examples of one-dimensional and two-dimensional Boolean cases. We introduce the concept of controllability matrix and show that controllability holds if and only if the controllability matrix is invertible.

Franco Bagnoli, Bassem Sellami, Amira Mouakher et al.

In this exploratory paper we introduce the problem of cognitive agents that learn how to modify their environment according to local sensing to reach a global goal. We concentrate on discrete dynamics (cellular automata) on a two-dimensional system. We show that agents may learn how to approximate their goal when the environment is passive, while this task becomes impossible if the environment follows an active dynamics.

Sara Dridi, Samira El Yacoubi, Franco Bagnoli et al.

Controllability is one of the central concepts of modern control theory that allows a good understanding of a system's behaviour. It consists in constraining a system to reach the desired state from an initial state within a given time interval. When the desired objective affects only a sub-region of the domain, the control is said to be regional. The purpose of this paper is to study a particular case of regional control using cellular automata models since they are spatially extended systems where spatial properties can be easily defined thanks to their intrinsic locality. We investigate the case of boundary controls on the target region using an original approach based on graph theory. Necessary and sufficient conditions are given based on the Hamiltonian Circuit and strongly connected component. The controls are obtained using a preimage approach.