Research Statements

Large-scale networks of dynamical systems are becoming increasingly important in science and technology. These systems arise in a variety of applications ranging from social networks, power systems, and robotics. In modeling, analysis, and control of networked systems, it is of fundamental importance to understand the interplay between network structure and underlying dynamical properties. My research centers on design of distributed controllers and analysis of performance limitations in large-scale networks of dynamical systems. Particular emphasis has been placed on identification of communication architectures and on design of structured optimal controllers. In my PhD thesis, I have developed a sparsity-promoting optimal control framework to quantify the trade-off between performance of systems and sparsity of controllers. Efficient algorithms for the synthesis of distributed controllers have been developed with applications in formation of vehicles [1], synchronization of oscillators [2], consensus networks [3], leader-follower networks [4, 5], and social networks [6, 7].