Decentralized Real-Time Optimization of Cyber-Physical Systems – The Power of Newton Steps for Control Timm Faulwasser 23.07.2025, 13:00 Uhr Am Schwarzenberg-Campus 5 (H), Raum 0.07 und Zoom https://tuhh.zoom.us/j/81920578609?pwd=TjBmYldRdXVDT1VkamZmc1BOajREZz09 Zusammenfassung: Model Predictive Control (MPC) is based on receding-horizon solution of optimal control problems and it is among the most successful advanced control methods. Core reasons are its applicability to nonlinear systems with constraints as well as the variety of tailored numerical algorithms and powerful software tools enabling
efficient real-time implementations [1]. The application of MPC to cyber-physical systems (or to multi-
agent systems) is of pivotal interest in many application domains such as energy systems, logistics and
transport, and robotics [2]. In this talk we present recent results on collaborative distributed nonlinear MPC
for cyber-physical systems. We discuss a family of algorithms which is based on the decomposition
of primal-dual Newton steps arising from Sequential Quadratic Programming (SQP) [3]. We explore
how the underlying partially separable problem structure translates into partially separable Newton
steps which can then be computed in decentralized fashion, i.e., based only on neighbor-to-neighbor
communication. Moreover, we show that this numerical framework for decentralized real-time iterations in distributed NMPC
allows for closed-loop stability guarantees [4] and for scalability [5]. Our findings are illustrated with several examples including multiple
real-time implementations [6,7].
1] Gros, S., Zanon, M., Quirynen, R., Bemporad, A., & Diehl, M. (2020). From linear to nonlinear MPC:
bridging the gap via the real-time iteration. International Journal of Control, 93(1), 62-80.
[2] Christofides, P. D., Scattolini, R., de la Pena, D. M., & Liu, J. (2013). Distributed model predictive
control: A tutorial review and future research directions. Computers & Chemical Engineering, 51,
21-41.
[3] Stomberg, G., Engelmann, A., & Faulwasser, T. (2022). Decentralized non-convex optimization via
bi-level SQP and ADMM. In 61st Conference on Decision and Control (CDC), 273-278.
[4] Stomberg, G., Engelmann, A., Diehl, M., & Faulwasser, T. (2024). Decentralized real-time iterations
for distributed nonlinear model predictive control. arXiv preprint arXiv:2401.14898.
[5] Stomberg, G., Raetsch, M., Engelmann, A., & Faulwasser, T. (2025). Large problems are not necessarily hard: A case study on distributed NMPC paying off. European Control Conference
[6] Stomberg, G., Ebel, H., Faulwasser, T., & Eberhard, P. (2023). Cooperative distributed MPC via de-
centralized real-time optimization: Implementation results for robot formations. Control Engineering
Practice, 138, 105579.
[7] Stomberg, G., Schwan, R., Grillo, A., Jones, C. N., & Faulwasser, T. (2025). Cooperative distributed model predictive control for embedded systems: Experiments with hovercraft formations. 2025 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation  |
For What the Bell Tolls David Keyes Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences and Engineering, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia 13.06.2025, 10:00 Uhr Gebäude N, Raum 0007 Zusammenfassung: With today’s exascale computers requiring 20 to 40 MW and some cloud centers exceeding 100MW, with no slacking of demand in sight, computing is a nonnegligible factor in climate change. For the past three years, we have been finalists in the Gordon Bell Prize with computations that do more with less – that scale up while squeezing out operations and data transfers that do not ultimately impact application accuracy requirements. Scientific and engineering computing has a history of “oversolving” inherited from a period when its cost was small enough to neglect. Today’s market for computing hardware is driven by machine learning applications that are able to exploit lower precision arithmetic. Traditional computational science and engineering are therefore being reinvented to employ lower precision arithmetic and replacement of blocks of operator and field data by low-rank substitutes, where possible without impacting accuracy. We provide examples from various applications, including Gordon Bell Prize finalist research in 2022 in environmental statistics, in 2023 in seismic processing, and in 2024 in genomics and again in climate emulation. The last was awarded the 2024 Gordon Bell Prize in Climate Modeling. In this talk, we will elucidate the algorithmic “secret sauce” shared by these diverse applications for which the (Gordon) Bell tolls. Zusätzliche Informationen zur Person: David Keyes is Professor of Applied Mathematics and Computational Science and the Director of the Extreme Computing Research Center, having served as the Dean of the Division of Mathematical and Computer Sciences and Engineering at KAUST for its first 3.5 years. Also an Adjunct Professor and former Fu Foundation Chair Professor in Applied Physics and Applied Mathematics at Columbia University, and an affiliate of several laboratories of the U.S. Department of Energy, Keyes graduated in Aerospace and Mechanical Sciences from Princeton in 1978 and earned a doctorate in Applied Mathematics from Harvard in 1984. Before joining KAUST among the founding faculty, he led scalable solver software projects in the ASCI and SciDAC programs of the U.S. Department of Energy. Keyes works at the algorithmic interface between parallel computing and the numerical analysis of partial differential equations, with a focus on implicit scalable solvers for emerging architectures and their use in the many large-scale applications in energy and environment governed by conservation laws that demand high performance because of high resolution, high dimension, high fidelity physical models, or the "multi-solve" requirements of optimization, control, sensitivity analysis, inverse problems, data assimilation, or uncertainty quantification.  |
Prediction of nonlinear waves from remote measurements — a large PDE-constrained optimization problem to solve in real time Nicolas Desmars DLR, https://tuhh.zoom.us/j/81920578609?pwd=TjBmYldRdXVDT1VkamZmc1BOajREZz09 11.03.2025, 10:00 Uhr Am Schwarzenberg-Campus 5 (H), Raum 0.03 Zusammenfassung: The availability of real-time phase-resolved wave fields is crucial for the prediction and control of wave-induced motion of marine structures, a key parameter to extend the operational envelope and improve the optimal maneuvering of surface vessels. Using marine radar measurements of the ocean surface, the first step of the prediction problem is to reconstruct the surface dynamics (i.e. to extract the wave-related information from the measurements) in order to get the initial state of a wave model and propagate it in time to obtain the future wave conditions. Although fast and accurate models are available to propagate wave fields, the surface reconstruction — which can be seen as a nonlinear PDE-constrained optimization problem — is a very challenging task to perform in real time. In this talk, the specifics of the problem, which include the cost function to minimize, the wave model (PDE) and the optimization procedure, will be first presented with an emphasis on the use of parallel computation. Then, results will be shown for the simplified case of unidirectional waves. Finally, ideas for the efficient implementation (e.g. parallel in time) of the solver in the case of directional waves will be discussed.  |