Prof. Kai Cai is invited to give a IES Distinguished Talk

Date/Time: November 14th, Tuesday, 10:30AM-11:30AM

Room: ECS 660

Title: Types of Graph Laplacian Matrices and their Roles in Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems

Abstract: In the field of systems and control, many cooperative control problems of multi-agent systems have been actively studied in the past two decades. Common in the formulation and resolution of these problems, a graph Laplacian matrix plays a key role. A graph Laplaican matrix is an important representation of graph topology, which describes the interconnection structure of the agents. Depending on the field of the entries, there are three types of Laplacian matrices: standard Laplacian (nonnegative diagonal entries and nonpositive off-diagonal entries), signed Laplacian (arbitrary real entries), and complex Laplacian (arbitrary complex entries). This talk will introduce these different types of Laplacian matrices, and their roles in modeling and solving different sets of cooperative control problems. Particular attention will be given to their algebraic properties that are fundamental in characterizing stability and performance of the respective solution algorithms.

Biography: Prof. Kai Cai received the B.Eng. degree in electrical engineering from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China, in 2006, the M.A.Sc. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada, in 2008, and the Ph.D. degree in systems science from the Tokyo Institute of Technology, Tokyo, Japan, in 2011.,He is currently a Professor with Osaka City University, Osaka, Japan. Previously, he was an Associate Professor with Osaka City University from 2014 to 2020, an Assistant Professor with the University of Tokyo, Tokyo, Japan, from 2013 to 2014, and a Postdoctoral Fellow with the University of Toronto from 2011 to 2013. He is the co-author (with W. M. Wonham) of the books entitled Supervisory Control of Discrete-Event Systems (New York, NY, USA: Springer, 2019) and Supervisor Localization (New York, NY, USA: Springer, 2016). His research interests include distributed control of discrete-event systems and cooperative control of networked multiagent systems.,Dr. Cai is the Chair for the Technical Committee on Discrete Event Systems of the IEEE Control System Society and an Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control. He was the recipient of the Pioneer Award of SICE in 2021, the Best Paper Award of SICE in 2013, the Best Student Paper Award of the IEEE Multiconference on Systems and Control, and the Young Author’s Award of SICE in 2010.