Yushen Long

Yushen Long, Lihua Xie, Shuai Liu

An iterative learning based economic model predictive controller (ILEMPC) is proposed for repetitive tasks in this paper. Compared with existing works, the initial feasible trajectory of the proposed ILEMPC is not restricted to be convergent to an equilibrium so it can handle various types of control objectives: stabilization, tracking a periodic trajectory and even pure economic optimization. The controller can learn from the previous closed-loop trajectory, resulting in a performance which is guaranteed to be no worse than the previous one. Under some standard assumptions in model predictive control, we show that recursive feasibility is ensured. Furthermore, for stabilization problem, the convergence of each learned trajectory and the learning process are established provided the initial trajectory is convergent. Numerical examples show that the proposed control strategy works well for different types of control tasks and systems.

Yi Zhang, Yushen Long, Yun Ni et al.

Online ride-hailing platforms aim to deliver efficient mobility-on-demand services, often facing challenges in balancing dynamic and spatially heterogeneous supply and demand. Existing methods typically fall into two categories: reinforcement learning (RL) approaches, which suffer from data inefficiency, oversimplified modeling of real-world dynamics, and difficulty enforcing operational constraints; or decomposed online optimization methods, which rely on manually designed high-level objectives that lack awareness of low-level routing dynamics. To address this issue, we propose a novel hybrid framework that integrates large language model (LLM) with mathematical optimization in a dynamic hierarchical system: (1) it is training-free, removing the need for large-scale interaction data as in RL, and (2) it leverages LLM to bridge cognitive limitations caused by problem decomposition by adaptively generating high-level objectives. Within this framework, LLM serves as a meta-optimizer, producing semantic heuristics that guide a low-level optimizer responsible for constraint enforcement and real-time decision execution. These heuristics are refined through a closed-loop evolutionary process, driven by harmony search, which iteratively adapts the LLM prompts based on feasibility and performance feedback from the optimization layer. Extensive experiments based on scenarios derived from both the New York and Chicago taxi datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach, achieving an average improvement of 16% compared to state-of-the-art baselines.