On April 26, 2023, Dr Athanasopoulos gave a lecture in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens with the title “Complexity-aware set-based methods in analysis and decision making”.Set-based methods offer tools rich enough to address a series of challenges in complex decision problems in engineering today related to, for example, safety, stability, robustness, and performance. Nevertheless, although the theory is general enough to apply in almost every meaningful problem formulation, a straightforward implementation in analysis and control design inevitably hits computational complexity barriers. After introducing the main, celebrated methods in set-based analysis and control, Dr Athanasopoulos presented a new approach of computing invariant sets from a computational geometry point of view; in specific, there were presented two new elementary operations for changing the shape of polytopic invariant sets and preserve invariance at the same time, exploiting order theoretic properties of the face lattice of polytopes. The second part of the talk was focused on application-oriented results that take into account the system structure to face the barrier of complexity, related to (i) large scale systems (scheduling and resource allocation of computing networks), (ii) nonlinearity and nonconvexity (robotics), and (iii) temporal specifications (cybersecurity).
Dr Athanasopoulos is a Senior Lecturer in Control, in the School of Electronics, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK. His main interests lie in control with a focus on hybrid systems and set-based methods, with applications to robotics, networked systems, computing, and in general cyber-physical systems. He is the recipient of an IKY and a Marie Curie fellowship. He has held postdoctoral positions in Eindhoven University of Technology, the Netherlands, and University of Louvain, Belgium. He obtained his Diploma and PhD from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department in University of Patras.
