Daniele Masti

Daniele Masti, Francesco Basciani, Arianna Fedeli et al.

Digital Twins (DTs) are increasingly used as autonomous decision-makers in complex socio-technical systems. Their mathematically optimal decisions often diverge from human expectations, exposing a persistent gap between algorithmic and bounded human rationality. This work addresses this gap by proposing a framework that operationalizes fairness as a learnable objective within optimization-based Digital Twins. We introduce a preference-driven learning pipeline that infers latent fairness objectives directly from human pairwise preferences over feasible decisions. A novel Siamese neural network is developed to generate convex quadratic cost functions conditioned on contextual information. The resulting surrogate objectives align optimization outcomes with human-perceived fairness while maintaining computational efficiency. The approach is demonstrated on a COVID-19 hospital resource allocation scenario. This study provides an actionable path toward embedding human-centered fairness in the design of autonomous decision-making systems.

Filippo Fabiani, Bartolomeo Stellato, Daniele Masti et al. · princeton

We consider the problem of designing a machine learning-based model of an unknown dynamical system from a finite number of (state-input)-successor state data points, such that the model obtained is also suitable for optimal control design. We adopt a neural network (NN) architecture that, once suitably trained, yields a hybrid system with continuous piecewise-affine (PWA) dynamics that is differentiable with respect to the network's parameters, thereby enabling the use of derivative-based training procedures. We show that a careful choice of our NN's weights produces a hybrid system model with structural properties that are highly favorable when used as part of a finite horizon optimal control problem (OCP). Specifically, we rely on available results to establish that optimal solutions with strong local optimality guarantees can be computed via nonlinear programming (NLP), in contrast to classical OCPs for general hybrid systems which typically require mixed-integer optimization. Besides being well-suited for optimal control design, numerical simulations illustrate that our NN-based technique enjoys very similar performance to state-of-the-art system identification methods for hybrid systems and it is competitive on nonlinear benchmarks.

Daniele Masti, Daniele Bernardini, Alberto Bemporad

This paper introduces a novel model-free approach to synthesize virtual sensors for the estimation of dynamical quantities that are unmeasurable at runtime but are available for design purposes on test benches. After collecting a dataset of measurements of such quantities, together with other variables that are also available during on-line operations, the virtual sensor is obtained using machine learning techniques by training a predictor whose inputs are the measured variables and the features extracted by a bank of linear observers fed with the same measures. The approach is applicable to infer the value of quantities such as physical states and other time-varying parameters that affect the dynamics of the system. The proposed virtual sensor architecture - whose structure can be related to the Multiple Model Adaptive Estimation framework - is conceived to keep computational and memory requirements as low as possible, so that it can be efficiently implemented in embedded hardware platforms. The effectiveness of the approach is shown in different numerical examples, involving the estimation of the scheduling parameter of a nonlinear parameter-varying system, the reconstruction of the mode of a switching linear system, and the estimation of the state of charge (SoC) of a lithium-ion battery.