Jörg Raisch

Zenit Music, Fabio Molinari, Sebastian Gallenmüller et al.

The topic of this paper is to use an intuitive model-based approach to design a networked controller for a recent benchmark scenario. The benchmark problem is to remotely control a two-wheeled inverted pendulum robot via W-LAN communication. The robot has to keep a vertical upright position. Incorporating wireless communication in the control loop introduces multiple uncertainties and affects system performance and stability. The proposed networked control scheme employs model predictive techniques and deliberately extends delays in order to make them constant and deterministic. The performance of the resulting networked control system is evaluated experimentally with a predefined benchmarking experiment and is compared to local control involving no delays.

Fabio Molinari, Sławomir Stańczak, Jörg Raisch

This paper presents a consensus protocol that achieves max-consensus in multi-agent systems over wireless channels. Interference, a feature of the wireless channel, is exploited: each agent receives a superposition of broadcast data, rather than individual values. With this information, the system endowed with the proposed consensus protocol reaches max-consensus in a finite number of steps. A comparison with traditional approaches shows that the proposed consensus protocol achieves a faster convergence.

Fabio Molinari, Jörg Raisch

This paper investigates a consensus-based auction algorithm in the context of decentralized traffic control. In particular, we study the automation of a road intersection, where a set of vehicles is required to cross without collisions. The crossing order will be negotiated in a decentralized fashion. An on-board model predictive controller (MPC) will compute an optimal trajectory which avoids collisions with higher priority vehicles, thus retaining convex safety constraints. Simulations are then performed in a time-variant traffic environment.

Naim Bajcinca, Yashar Kouhi, Vladislav Nenchev et al.

A general decentralized computational framework for set-valued state estimation and prediction for the class of systems that accept a hybrid state machine representation is considered in this article. The decentralized scheme consists of a conjunction of distributed state machines that are specified by a decomposition of the external signal space. While this is shown to produce, in general, outer approximations of the outcomes of the original monolithic state machine, here, specific rules for the signal space decomposition are devised by utilizing structural properties of the underyling transition relation, leading to a recovery of the exact state set results. By applying a suitable approximation algorithm, we show that computational complexity in the decentralized setting may thereby essentially reduce as compared to the centralized estimation scheme.

Fabio Molinari, Sławomir Stańczak, Jörg Raisch

This paper studies system stability and performance of multi-agent systems in the context of consensus problems over wireless multiple-access channels (MAC). We propose a consensus algorithm that exploits the broadcast property of the wireless channel. Therefore, the algorithm is expected to exhibit fast convergence and high efficiency in terms of the usage of scarce wireless resources. The designed algorithm shows robustness against variations in the channel and consensus is always reached. However the consensus value will be depending on these variations.

Christian Nauck, Michael Lindner, Nora Molkenthin et al.

A central question of network science is how functional properties of systems arise from their structure. For networked dynamical systems, structure is typically quantified with network measures. A functional property that is of theoretical and practical interest for oscillatory systems is the stability of synchrony to localized perturbations. Recently, Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) have been shown to predict this stability successfully; at the same time, network measures have struggled to paint a clear picture. Here we collect 46 relevant network measures and find that no small subset can reliably predict stability. The performance of GNNs can only be matched by combining all network measures and nodewise machine learning. However, unlike GNNs, this approach fails to extrapolate from network ensembles to several real power grid topologies. This suggests that correlations of network measures and function may be misleading, and that GNNs capture the causal relationship between structure and stability substantially better.

Halil Yigit Oksuz, Fabio Molinari, Henning Sprekeler et al.

In a multi-agent system, agents can cooperatively learn a model from data by exchanging their estimated model parameters, without the need to exchange the locally available data used by the agents. This strategy, often called federated learning, is mainly employed for two reasons: (i) improving resource-efficiency by avoiding to share potentially large datasets and (ii) guaranteeing privacy of local agents' data. Efficiency can be further increased by adopting a beyond-5G communication strategy that goes under the name of Over-the-Air Computation. This strategy exploits the interference property of the wireless channel. Standard communication schemes prevent interference by enabling transmissions of signals from different agents at distinct time or frequency slots, which is not required with Over-the-Air Computation, thus saving resources. In this case, the received signal is a weighted sum of transmitted signals, with unknown weights (fading channel coefficients). State of the art papers in the field aim at reconstructing those unknown coefficients. In contrast, the approach presented here does not require reconstructing channel coefficients by complex encoding-decoding schemes. This improves both efficiency and privacy.

Vladislav Nenchev, Christos G. Cassandras, Jörg Raisch

This paper addresses an optimal control problem for a robot that has to find and collect a finite number of objects and move them to a depot in minimum time. The robot has fourth-order dynamics that change instantaneously at any pick-up or drop-off of an object. The objects are modeled by point masses with a-priori unknown locations in a bounded two-dimensional space that may contain unknown obstacles. For this hybrid system, an Optimal Control Problem (OCP) is approximately solved by a receding horizon scheme, where the derived lower bound for the cost-to-go is evaluated for the worst and for a probabilistic case, assuming a uniform distribution of the objects. First, a time-driven approximate solution based on time and position space discretization and mixed integer programming is presented. Due to the high computational cost of this solution, an alternative event-driven approximate approach based on a suitable motion parameterization and gradient-based optimization is proposed. The solutions are compared in a numerical example, suggesting that the latter approach offers a significant computational advantage while yielding similar qualitative results compared to the former. The methods are particularly relevant for various robotic applications like automated cleaning, search and rescue, harvesting or manufacturing.

Anne-Kathrin Schmuck, Paulo Tabuada, Jörg Raisch

This paper is concerned with a detailed comparison of two different abstraction techniques for the construction of finite state symbolic models for controller synthesis of hybrid systems. Namely, we compare quotient based abstractions (QBA), with different realizations of strongest (asynchronous) $l$-complete approximations (SAlCA) Even though the idea behind their construction is very similar, we show that they are generally incomparable both in terms of behavioral inclusion and similarity relations. We therefore derive necessary and sufficient conditions for QBA to coincide with particular realizations of SAlCA. Depending on the original system, either QBA or SAlCA can be a tighter abstraction.