PhD thesis at GIPSA-Lab in Grenoble (France)
Topic: Continuous models for the control of large networks: graphon limits
Advisors: Paolo Frasca and Federica Garin
Duration: 3 years, starting fall 2023
More details and application procedure:
https://emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Doctorant/UMR5216-VIRFAU-036/Default.aspx?lang=EN
Thesis’ context and objectives:
This work will be carried out in the DANCE team (Dynamics and Control of Networks), a research team of GIPSA-Lab research center in Grenoble, France. The team’s research concerns modeling, estimation and control of network systems, with a broad spectrum of theoretical and applied topics including traffic networks, intelligent vehicles, social dynamics, and analysis of large-scale complex networks. This PhD position is part of a broader research project funded by ANR (the French national science foundation) on Continuous Methods for the Control of Large Networks (COCOON).
Networks are an essential paradigm to describe a huge variety of large complex systems, including social networks, epidemics networks, transportation networks, supply chains, power networks, multi-agent systems, and collective motion and navigation. The theory of Automatic Control needs substantial advancements to manage these network dynamics, because achieving control and estimation objectives using standard methods is made intractable by the ever-growing network size. Instead, these large networks and the dynamics therein require adapted tools for modeling, learning, monitoring, and control.
This PhD thesis will have the objective to develop control-theoretic tools for large networks represented by a continuous model, in particular by graphons (a suitable limit of graph sequences of growing size). This work will cover a broad range of questions about modeling, estimation, and control.
