Sponsored Workshops and Tutorials

In parallel with the IFAC'2017 pre-Congress Workshops and Tutorials, several additional sponsored workshop and tutorials are organized. These are summarized in the next tables and details follow.

A Guide to Being Active in the Community as Author and Reviewer

All IFAC World Congress participants are welcome to participate to the "Author/Reviewer" workshop organized jointly by IFAC and Elsevier. The registration is free, but mandatory for logistic reasons.

iCODE sponsored Workshop

All IFAC World Congress participants are welcome to participate to the "Control and decision at Paris-Saclay" workshop organized by the Institute for Control and Decision of Paris Saclay University (iCODE). The aim of this event is to briefly present the iCODE initiative and to get an overview of recent advances and perspectives in the four core iCODE topics: Challenge Eco: Bounded rationality in behavioral economics ; Challenge Energy: Decision support for energetic transition ; Challenge Exo: Lightweight exoskeleton for teenagers ; Challenge Neuro: Control theory approach for neuroscience.

GdR MACS sponsored Tutorials

7 tutorials are organized by GdR MACS with financial support of CNRS. GdR MACS is the CNRS structure dedicated to scientific coordination of automation and control research activities in France. It organizes on bi-annual basis tutorials in French for PhD students of the French research centers. In 2017, these tutorials are organized in conjunction with the IFAC'2017 organization. These tutorials are held in French, and only partly in English. See also the Ecole MACS web page (in French).

Two days GdR MACS Tutorials

One day GdR MACS Tutorials

Find below detailed information about the Sponsored Workshops and Tutorials

A Guide to Being Active in the Community as Author and Reviewer

Half-a-day workshop help on 9 July afternoon

It is composed of 3 talks

• Writing high quality reviews, by Andrew Teel
  Topics: thorough reviews should be comprehensive in examining various aspects of the paper on top of just accuracy. This includes if the paper is written clearly and concisely, contains *significant* advances to the academic record, and, as appropriate, provides enough information to foster reproducibility.
• How to Get Published, by Bob Bitmead
  Topics: Even before starting to write the paper, all authors must understand the basic ethics underpinning academic publishing. From there, selecting the appropriate journal is key – consider the audience, scope, quality etc. To get accepted, it is not just important that the paper presents a significant advancement, but be written in a concise but thorough way.
• Get read: How to Promote Your Own Paper, by Alison Waldron
  Topics: The publisher does a lot to make your work more visible including SEO to ensure discoverability, promotion at conferences, email campaigns, etc. But there is a lot authors can also do. The first of course is having a good title and well written abstract, but other things include leveraging social media, Elsevier’s Sharelinks, Contact University press offices etc.

Control and decision at Paris-Saclay

Half-a-day workshop help on 9 July afternoon

It is composed of 5 talks (see also the PDF file of the program)

• "Overview of the iCODE initiative", by Yacine Chitour, professor at Univ. Paris Sud – L2S, head of iCODE
• "Mean field games and applications – Challenge Energy", by Guilherme Mazanti, post-doc at Univ. Paris Sud, Hadamard Lecturer at FMJH
• "An overview of contract theory and application to moral hazard problems with mean field type interactions – Challenge Eco", by Thibaut Mastrolia, associate professor at Ecole polytechnique – CMAP
• "HYDROïD - Integrated hydraulic actuation technology for humanoid robotic applications – Challenge Exo", by Samer Al Fayad, associate professor at UVSQ – LISV
• "Control of spatio-temporal brain oscillations: recent results and perspectives – Challenge Neuro", by Antoine Chaillet, professor at CentraleSupélec – L2S, junior member of IUF

Interval Methods and Applications

Two-days tutorial held on 8-9 July

Abstract: Interval methods provide neat and effective methods for solving hard nonlinear problems (e.g. computing all global minima for a non-convex criterion). Contrariwise to standard numerical tools, such as e.g. Monte Carlo methods, the results obtained are complete and guaranteed, even if obtained in finite time and in presence of complicated or partial functions. Moreover, since interval methods can handle naturally any sort of bounded uncertainty, they allow the precise characterization of the uncertainty on the results.

The course aims at (i) introducing in a didactic way up-to-date interval methods, (ii) illustrating the effectiveness of interval methods when solving actual problems from Automatic Control, and (iii) introducing the participants to the available “interval methods” based software tools.

It is composed of 5 talks and exercises (see also the dedicated Web site):

• "Interval analysis for the resolution of nonlinear problems in control - Application to robust estimation, path planning, guidance and navigation", by Luc Jaulin
• "Interval observers and fault tolerant control", by Tarek Raïssi
• "Reachability computation with hybrid dynamical systems - Application to state estimation", by Nacim Ramdani
• "Reachability for control synthesis and validation", by Nacim Meslem
• "Guaranteed characterization of confidence sets - Application to distributed localisation", by Michel Kieffer
• "Projects using pyIbex toolbox", by Luc Jaulin
  During the practice, Python will be used, but an initial knowledge of Python is not needed. We will consider several exercises with PyIbex with an increasing complexity. These exercises are related to Estimation and Robot Localization.

Discrete Event Systems

Two-days tutorial held on 8-9 July

Abstract: In control engineering, a discrete event system (DES) is a discrete-state, event-driven system of which the state evolution depends entirely on the occurrence of asynchronous discrete events over time. This tutorial is aimed to be introductive (accessible for young researchers) as well as illustrative of DES contributions (typically through applications using existing tools). Three sessions will be focused on well-known approaches for DES. A last session will be more forward-looking: some recent advances and new directions for DES researches will be presented.

This tutorial is composed of 4 sessions:

• "maxplus algebra", by B. Cottenceau, M. Lhommeau and S. Lahaye (University of Angers, France)
  Presentation of formalisms, a selection of results for analysis and control of DES with illustrations through dedicated software toolboxes and libraries.
• "Supervisory control theory", by M. Fabian (Chalmers Univ. of Technology, Sweden) and L. Pietrac (INSA Lyon, France)
  Introduction to theory and formalisms (automata and languages) and some interesting results with respect to modular, decentralized, hierarchical control architectures with total or partial observation, with illustrations using Supremica
• "Petri nets", by Cristian Mahulea and Francesco Basile (University of Salerno, Italy)
  Introduction, a selection of results for analysis and control of DES with illustrations through dedicated software toolboxes and libraries.
• "Recent advances and new directions for DES research", by Christos Cassandras and Stephane Lafortune (to be confirmed)

Modeling, Estimation, and Control of Aerial Vehicles

One-day tutorial held on 8 July

This tutorial is composed of 4 talks (see also the dedicated Web site):

• "Modeling and Control of Aerial Vehicles for Contact-free flight", by Nicolas Marchand
• "State Estimation for Aerial Vehicles", by Hassen Fourati
• "Modeling and Control of  Aerial Vehicles for Manipulation and Physical Interaction", by Antonio Franchi
• "Control and Estimation for Multi Aerial Vehicles", by Paolo Robuffo Giordano.

Automatic Control and Wireless Sensor Networks

One-day tutorial held on 8 July

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks refer to the large-scale deployment of small, inexpensive, and battery-powered sensing devices with on-board processing and wireless communication capabilities which achieve a self-organized, infrastructure-less, and fault-tolerant sensor network in a cooperative way. Such networks make possible dense monitoring and analysis of complex physical, chemical or biological phenomena over large regions of space and over long periods of time. The course objectives are to show how the methodological tools derived from Automatic Control theory can be used for modelling, analysing and controlling this kind of networks.

It is composed of 3 talks:

• "Introduction to sensor networks", by Vincent Lecuire
  This part of the course will present first the fundamental characterisctics of wireless sensor networks and their main application domains. Then we will focus on the energy limitation problem and its effect on the network lifetime. Last, the methods and protocols which permit to reduce the energy consumption will be studied.
• "Sensor network management for environmental monitoring", by Didier Georges
  This part of the course will be devoted to the  issue of  deploying and managing  sensor networks when they are used to monitor environmental phenomena (estimation and prediction of the transport and diffusion of aquatic or atmospheric pollutants for example). The objective is to show how observability analysis methods of dynamic distributed parameter systems derived from Automatic Control theory can be used to ensure the optimal placement of sensors and the management of the energy consumption of the network.
• "Adaptive Routing for Sensor Networks" by Abdelhamid Mellouk
  Generally, the sensor networks' topologies are dynamic in nature (emerge via instance interaction among nodes) that raise many open-ended questions. This part of the course is focused on multi-criteria adaptive routing mechanisms. Two important criteria will be considered: the energy consumption and the transit delay of the information collected by the sensors. More specifically, we will focus on continuous and distributed learning mechanisms that take into account the dynamic nature of the networks.

Performance, Modeling and Simulation

One-day tutorial held on 8 July

Human-machine systems

One-day tutorial held on 9 July

It is composed of 2 talks:

• "What should be the process of testing and approving automated vehicles for operation on the road?", by Oliver Carsten
  This course focuses on how to test highly and fully automated vehicles in order to ensure that they operate safely on the roads. The approval of aircraft for civil operation may provide an analogue, but automated road vehicles will be required to operate in much more varied and often unstable conditions, and in encounters with manually driven vehicles as well as vulnerable road users. Another analogue is the driving test that human drivers have to pass before obtaining a driving licence. This course examines the challenge of creating an approval process and of carrying out human-in-the-loop testing, for example of situations where the human driver would have to resume control. The course consists of three main elements: (1) Relevant human factors theory on interaction with automation and with automated vehicles; (2) A review of recent discussion in Europe and North America on possible processes for approval (certification); (3) Group exercises to propose testing procedures that could address the challenges.
• "3D simulator and Multimodale interface: theory and practice", by Yann Morere.
  This mini courses aims to give pieces of advice, methods when you start to develop a “serious” simulator based on a real life device using differentes types of input/outputs (modalities). After presenting some theoritical aspects of the multimodal interfaces, virtual reality and 3D simulation, we'll some good practices to build your own 3D simulator. This minicourses aims to be very practical and close to the development, even if we don't give source code. We will give example based on different software. We will answer some questions like : Low Polygon? Baked Texture? Loops simulation and Threading? What about scripting? How to get the data from such device? Which 3D engine? How to connect the device to the 3D engine? What about performance of the system?

Industrial Engineering for Health Care Systems

One-day tutorial held on 9 July

It is composed of 2 talks given by Maria Di Mascolo and Thibaud Monteiro