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1. Learning-based Sensor Selection with Guaranteed Performance Bounds

   https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC53348.2022.9867174  

   Vafaee, Reza ; Siami, Milad ( January 2022 , 2022 American Control Conference (ACC))

   In this paper, we consider the problem of sensor selection for discrete-time linear dynamical networks. We develop a framework to design a sparse sensor schedule for a given large-scale linear system with guaranteed performance bounds using a learning-based algorithm. To sparsify the sensors in both time and space, we build our combinatorial optimization problems based on the notion of systemic controllability/observability metrics for linear dynamical networks with three properties: monotonicity, convexity, and homogeneity with respect to the controllability/observability Gramian matrix of the network. These combinatorial optimizations are inherently intractable and NP-hard. However, solving a continuous relaxation for each optimization is considered best practice. This is achievable since we constructed the objective based on the systemic metrics, which are convex. Furthermore, by leveraging recent advances in sparsification literature and regret minimization, we then round the fractional solution obtained by the continuous optimization to achieve a (1+epsilon) approximation sparse schedule that chooses on average a constant number of sensors at each time, to approximate all types of systemic metrics. 

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2. On the effects of memory and topology on the controllability of complex dynamical networks

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-74269-5  

   Kyriakis, Panagiotis ; Pequito, Sérgio ; Bogdan, Paul ( December 2020 , Scientific Reports)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Recent advances in network science, control theory, and fractional calculus provide us with mathematical tools necessary for modeling and controlling complex dynamical networks (CDNs) that exhibit long-term memory. Selecting the minimum number of driven nodes such that the network is steered to a prescribed state is a key problem to guarantee that complex networks have a desirable behavior. Therefore, in this paper, we study the effects of long-term memory and of the topological properties on the minimum number of driven nodes and the required control energy. To this end, we introduce Gramian-based methods for optimal driven node selection for complex dynamical networks with long-term memory and by leveraging the structure of the cost function, we design a greedy algorithm to obtain near-optimal approximations in a computationally efficiently manner. We investigate how the memory and topological properties influence the control effort by considering Erdős–Rényi, Barabási–Albert and Watts–Strogatz networks whose temporal dynamics follow a fractional order state equation. We provide evidence that scale-free and small-world networks are easier to control in terms of both the number of required actuators and the average control energy. Additionally, we show how our method could be applied to control complex networks originating from the human brain and we discover that certain brain cortex regions have a stronger impact on the controllability of network than others. 

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3. Proximal algorithms for large-scale statistical modeling and sensor/actuator selection

   https://doi.org/10.1109/TAC.2019.2948268  

   Zare, Armin ; Mohammadi, Hesameddin ; Dhingra, Neil K. ; Georgiou, Tryphon T. ; Jovanovic, Mihailo R. ( July 2020 , IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control)

   Several problems in modeling and control of stochastically-driven dynamical systems can be cast as regularized semi-definite programs. We examine two such representative problems and show that they can be formulated in a similar manner. The first, in statistical modeling, seeks to reconcile observed statistics by suitably and minimally perturbing prior dynamics. The second seeks to optimally select a subset of available sensors and actuators for control purposes. To address modeling and control of large-scale systems we develop a unified algorithmic framework using proximal methods. Our customized algorithms exploit problem structure and allow handling statistical modeling, as well as sensor and actuator selection, for substantially larger scales than what is amenable to current general-purpose solvers. We establish linear convergence of the proximal gradient algorithm, draw contrast between the proposed proximal algorithms and alternating direction method of multipliers, and provide examples that illustrate the merits and effectiveness of our framework. 

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4. Selecting energy efficient inputs using graph structure

   https://doi.org/10.1080/00207179.2021.2022218  

   Klickstein, Isaac ; Sorrentino, Francesco ( January 2022 , International Journal of Control)

   Selecting appropriate inputs for systems described by complex networks is an important but difficult problem that largely remains open in the field of control of networks. Recent work has proposed two methods for energy efficient input selection; a gradient-based heuristic and a greedy approximation algorithm. We propose here an alternative method for input selection based on the analytic solution of the controllability Gramian of the ‘balloon graph’, a special model graph that captures the role of both distance and redundant paths between a driver node and a target node. The method presented is especially applicable for large networks where one is interested in controlling only a small number of outputs, or target nodes, for which current methods may not be practical because they require computing a typically very ill-conditioned matrix, called the controllability Gramian. Our method produces comparable results to the previous methods while being more computational efficient. 

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5. On the Complexity and Approximability of Optimal Sensor Selection for Kalman Filtering

   https://doi.org/10.23919/ACC.2018.8431016  

   Ye, Lintao ; Roy, Sandip ; Sundaram, Shreyas ( June 2018 , 2018 Annual American Control Conference (ACC))

   Given a linear dynamical system, we consider the problem of selecting (at design-time) an optimal set of sensors (subject to certain budget constraints) to minimize the trace of the steady state error covariance matrix of the Kalman filter. Previous work has shown that this problem is NP-hard for certain classes of systems and sensor costs; in this paper, we show that the problem remains NP-hard even for the special case where the system is stable and all sensor costs are identical. Furthermore, we show the stronger result that there is no constant-factor (polynomial-time) approximation algorithm for this problem. This contrasts with other classes of sensor selection problems studied in the literature, which typically pursue constant-factor approximations by leveraging greedy algorithms and submodularity of the cost function. Here, we provide a specific example showing that greedy algorithms can perform arbitrarily poorly for the problem of design-time sensor selection for Kalman filtering. 

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