Control theory with applications in traffic and engineering

In January 2011 Jan van Schuppen was appointed CWI Fellow. He received this distinction because of his contributions to science and management for CWI - the Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica in Amsterdam. Since 1978 Van Schuppen has been affiliated with CWI as a researcher and group leader. He is also Professor of Mathematical System Theory at Delft University of Technology. Van Schuppen is known for his research in control and system theory and his applications in engineering and traffic - such as research on routing problems for motorways to reduce travel times and traffic jams. The Fellowship enables him to pursue a research direction of his choice supported by CWI.

In the coming years, the recently appointed CWI Fellow plans to investigate hierarchical and distributed control systems, and the system theory of systems biology. Fundamental research of distributed control systems is an industrially motivated and theoretically difficult problem. Van Schuppen also investigates control of stochastic systems and of dike heights. He has supervised 17 PhD students, is editor of the journal Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems and editor of the Springer series Communications and Control Engineering.

Underwater vehicles
Van Schuppen’s research can be applied to many areas. This can be illustrated by the large European project - 'Control for coordination of distributed systems' (C4C) that it is coordinated by him. In this international project researchers work on control theory for distributed systems, for instance underwater submarine vehicles (without humans on board) and aerial vehicles (also without humans) that conduct surveys for environmental research, control of motorway networks in traffic control centers for example in the Netherlands, and control of complex machinery, such as large printer devices produced by the company Océ. Apart from CWI’s contribution the team includes researchers from four companies and eight academic organizations in Belgium, Cyprus, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands and Portugal.

More information:
www.cwi.nl/~schuppen and www.c4c-project.eu

Illustration:
Autonomous Underwater Vehicle 'Isurus', source: João Sousa, University of Porto