Mario di Bernardo of http://www.international.unina.it/

The emergence of coordinated action between groups of interacting individuals or agents is a common feature of multi-agent complex systems in Nature and Technology. Often different groups of agents need to interact to control and tame their behaviour. Among these types of behaviour, a notable case of study is that of herding where a group of “active agents” (the herders or controllers) is assigned the task of corralling and drive another set of agents (the herd) towards a desired goal region and maintain them therein, or to make the herd follow a desired path or trajectory. In Nature this is precisely what shepherd dogs do when controlling the motion of a group of flocking sheep. In Applied Science similar herding tasks have applications in robotic exploration, search and rescue operations, surveillance and containment and, more recently, in the study of human cooperation and interaction.  Currently, this problem is studied often assuming some simplifying properties such as that the target agents have a tendency to aggregate or flock with each other. Moreover it is often assumed that one or two agents are tasked with the goal of corralling the target agents without an explicit need to cooperate and share information in order to solve efficiently the problem. In this talk I will present recent work carried out by my group to model and analyse herding behaviour in complex systems in order to solve the herding control problem in the absence of some often made simplifying assumptions. After presenting the mathematical control problem of interest, I will discuss some of the solutions we proposed and investigate applications in human-machine cooperation and the emergence of coordinated behaviour in multi-agent systems.

Biography:

Mario di Bernardo (SMIEEE ’06, FIEEE 2012) is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of  Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Rector’s Delegate for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the new School of Advanced Studies set by the Italian Government in Naples in 2019. On 28th February 2007 he was bestowed the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific merits from the President of Italy. He was elevated to the grade of  Fellow of the IEEE  in January 2012 for his contributions to the analysis, control and applications of nonlinear systems and complex networks. He is currently serving as an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society for the term 2023-2025. He has been nominated VP Technical Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society for the term 2025-2026.

Mario di Bernardo (google.com)

Docenti.unina.it

University of Naples Federico II, Italy

Address:Naples, Canada