March 05, 2010, 1171 Chem

This talk addresses networks of dynamical systems, and presents a design and analysis strategy that represents the components with appropriate input-output properties as abstractions of their detailed models. The component - level task is to certify the prescribed input - output properties; the network-level task is to combine this input - output information with the interconnection graph to deduce global dynamical behavior. We will present analytical and numerical procedures for each task and illustrate them on examples. These examples include several biological networks which also serve to motivate the special interconnection structures that are emphasized in the talk.

Murat Arcak received his Ph.D. from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2000 under the direction of Petar Kokotovic. His research is in nonlinear systems and control theory with applications to biological networks, power systems, communication networks, and cooperative robotics. He received a CAREER Award from the National Science Foundation in 2003, the Donald P. Eckman Award from the American Automatic Control Council in 2006, and the SIAG/CST Prize from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in 2007.