Munich Aerospace Scholarship Holder receives IFAC Young Author Award

12 June 2019 - Munich Aerospace Scholarship Recipient Abolfazl Lavaei has been selected as one of the top three finalists for the IFAC Young Author Award at the 15th IFAC Symposium on Large-Scale Complex Systems: Theory and Applications (LSS), 2019. This symposium is a triennial event of the IFAC Technical Committee on Large-Scale Complex Systems, and the award is granted every three years. The Young Author Award honours the best papers by PhD students as first and presenting authors and principal contributors of the presented research results.

In their paper titled ‘‘Compositional Construction of Finite MDPs for Large-Scale Stochastic Switched Systems: A Dissipativity Approach’’ Abolfazl Lavaei from Technical University of Munich and his supervisor Prof. Dr. Majid Zamani from the University of Colorado Boulder and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, propose for the first time a compositional methodology for the construction of finite MDPs for networks of stochastic switched systems accepting multiple storage functions with dwell-time. This type of compositional frameworks provides automated (push-button) as well as formal controller synthesis, which is absolutely crucial in many safety-critical applications such as autonomous vehicles, for large-scale cyber-physical systems to achieve some high-level specifications which are too difficult, if not impossible, to enforce with classical control theory approaches.

Abolfazl Lavaei is currently a PhD candidate with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Technical University of Munich (TUM). He has been a member of the Munich Aerospace Doctoral Scholarship Programme in the research group "Certifiable Autonomy in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles" since November 2016.