WS-1 Humanitarian Feedback Control Engineering

Instructor

Prof. Kevin M. Passino
Dept. Electrical and Computer Engineering
The Ohio State University, USA

Topics

Topics to be covered in this workshop (short course) include methods for centralized and distributed feedback control for sustainable development, along with their modeling and analysis:

1. Design of financial advisors for low-income persons
   • Use of monetary instruments (e.g., income).
   • Computational analysis (Monte Carlo simulation)
   • Implementation approaches (e.g., microfinance institutions).
2. Distributed control
   • Wealth distribution policy: Feature of money transfers, sensing. Emergence of cooperation that is mutually beneficial.
   • Democracy as distributed optimization: Model that includes personal assessments, voting, majority policy, and adjustment of wealth distribution policy.
3. Poverty traps and technology diffusion
   • ODE model, stability/instability, sensitivity analysis, optimization for aid policy decisions. b. Technology diffusion model, integrate with poverty trap model, analysis of equilibria, computational analysis.
4. Model of tragedy of the commons
   • Effect of population increases and development
   • Environmental justice policy
   • Feedback control of resource utilization and coping with population changes and the influence of development.
5. Cooperative management of community technology.
   • Trade-offs between human vs. computer automation for maintenance and operation of a community technology.
   • Feedback control strategy for partial automation, evaluation in simulation
6. Impact of technologies on sustainable community development
   • Model of a community (health, education, income, resource use)
   • Measures of development: Sustainable Community Development Index (SCDI), use of inequality adjustments, use of Monte Carlo simulation to study the impact of technologies on SCDI.

Schedule

9am-10:30am Lectures: Items 1, 2
Coffee break
10:45am-12pm Lectures: Items 2,3
Lunch
1:30pm-3pm Lectures: Items 3,4
Coffee break
3:15pm-5pm Lectures: Items 5,6

Audience/Benefits

The audience for this workshop is faculty and graduate students in the feedback control systems area. Persons interested in development of new theory, driven by new application areas, or in expansion of the application areas themselves will benefit from exposure to this new area of research for control systems.

Reference

Of particular relevance to this workshop is
Kevin M Passino, “Humanitarian Engineering: Creating Technologies That Help People,” Edition 2, Bede Pub., OH, 2015.
Free download, 735 pages, with Matlab code: https://hebook.engineering.osu.edu
For more information on project activities in the area of this workshop, see: http://www.ece.osu.edu/~passino/