Applied Math Professor Jun Liu received the Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems Paper Prize, which recognizes outstanding contributions to the field of hybrid systems documented in a paper published in the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) Journal Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems. At each IFAC World Congress the prize is awarded to the authors of two selected papers published in the journal in the three years preceding the IFAC World Congress.
The award-winning paper "Finite abstractions with robustness margins for temporal logic-based control synthesis", co-authored with Prof. Necmiye Ozay (University of Michigan), introduces a notion of finite abstractions that can be used to synthesize robust controllers for dynamical systems from temporal logic specifications. These finite abstractions provide a unified approach to various issues commonly encountered in implementing control systems. The authors also demonstrated that the quantitative nature of the robustness margins can be used to analyze the trade-offs between system performance and robustness. The research has implications for the design of robust cyber-physical systems such as autonomous vehicles.
The Awards Ceremony will take place during the Closing Ceremony of the 20th IFAC World Congress in Toulouse, France, July 9-14, 2017.