Christos G. Cassandras is Distinguished Professor of Engineering at Boston University. He is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering, Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and co-founder of Boston University’s Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE). He received degrees from Yale University (B.S., 1977), Stanford University (M.S.E.E., 1978), and Harvard University (S.M., 1979; Ph.D., 1982). In 1982-84 he was with ITP Boston, Inc. where he worked on the design of automated manufacturing systems. In 1984-1996 he was a faculty member at the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts/Amherst. He specializes in the areas of discrete event and hybrid systems, cooperative control, stochastic optimization, and computer simulation, with applications to computer and sensor networks, manufacturing systems, and transportation systems. He has published about 400 refereed papers in these areas, and six books. He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. In addition to his academic activities, he has worked extensively with industrial organizations on various systems integration projects and the development of decision-support software. He has most recently collaborated with The MathWorks, Inc. in the development of the discrete event and hybrid system simulator SimEvents. Dr. Cassandras was Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control from 1998 through 2009 and has also served as Editor for Technical Notes and Correspondence and Associate Editor. He is currently an Editor of Automatica. He was the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS). He has also served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS, as well as on several IEEE committees, and has chaired several conferences. He has been a plenary/keynote speaker at numerous international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002 and 2016, and has also been an IEEE Distinguished Lecturer. He is the recipient of several awards, including the 2011 IEEE Control Systems Technology Award, the Distinguished Member Award of the IEEE Control Systems Society (2006), the 1999 Harold Chestnut Prize (IFAC Best Control Engineering Textbook) for Discrete Event Systems: Modeling and Performance Analysis, a 2011 prize and a 2014 prize for the IBM/IEEE Smarter Planet Challenge competition (for a “Smart Parking” system and for the analytical engine of the Street Bump system respectively), the 2014 Engineering Distinguished Scholar Award at Boston University, several honorary professorships, a 1991 Lilly Fellowship and a 2012 Kern Fellowship. He is a member of Phi Beta Kappa and Tau Beta Pi. He is also a Fellow of the IEEE and a Fellow of the IFAC.
Martin Fabian is Full Professor in Automation and Head of the Automation Research group within the Division of Systems and Control, at the Department of Electrical Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology. After a Master degree in Chemical Engineering, he received the Ph.D. degree in Control Engineering in 1995 from Chalmers University of Technology, Göteborg, Sweden. Martin Fabian pioneered (together with Professor Bengt Lennartson) the on control of discrete event systems and its industrial application, at Chalmers and in Sweden. This on-going work has built up the research group in Automation, which now consists of five senior researchers, three PhD post-docs, and 13 PhD students among which 3 are industrial PhD students. The group is part of the Wingqvist/Vinnex Excellence Center, and co-hosts together with the Functional Programming group at the Department of Computer Science the Systematic Testing of Cyber-Physical Systems (SyTeC) strong research environment funded by the Swedish Research Council. Currently Martin Fabian teaches courses in Design and Scheduling of Automated Production Systems, and Discrete Event Control and Optimization. His research interests include formal methods for automation systems in a broad sense, merging the fields of Control Engineering, Computer Science, and Production Engineering; in particular the Supervisory Control Theory and its issues of calculational complexity. Recently he has transferred results from this application area into the field of model-based test generation. Professor Fabian has authored more than 100 publications, and is co-developer of the formal methods software tool Supremica available free for research and education at www.supremica.org. The Automation Research group has close connections with industrial collaborators, the main Swedish hi-tech companies Volvo, Zenuity, ABB.
Maria Pia Fanti (M'92-SM'02-F'17) received the Laurea degree in electronic engineering from the University of Pisa, Pisa, Italy, in 1983. She was a visiting researcher at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute of Troy, New York, in 1999. Since 1983, she has been with the Department of Electrical and Information Engineering of the Polytechnic of Bari, Italy, where she is currently a Full Professor of system and control engineering and Chair of the Laboratory of Automation and Control. Her research interests include discrete-event systems; Petri net; consensus protocols; fault detection; management and modeling of complex systems, such as production systems, logistic and healthcare systems. She has published more than +270 papers and two textbooks on these topics. Prof. Fanti was General Chair of the 2011 IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering. She is Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering and Associate Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems. She is member at large of the Board of Governors of the IEEE SMC Society, Co-Chair of the Technical committee on Discrete Event Systems of the IEEE SMC Society, and of the Technical Committee on Automation in Logistics of the IEEE Robotics and Automation Society.
Alessandro Giua is professor of Automatic Control at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering (DIEE) of the University of Cagliari, Italy. He is also a professor (on leave) at the Information and Systems Sciences Laboratory (LSIS) of Aix-Marseille University, France. He received a Ph.D. degree in computer and systems engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, USA in 1992. He has also held visiting positions in several institutions worldwide, including Xidian University, Xi’an, China. His research interests include discrete event systems, hybrid systems, networked control systems, Petri nets and failure diagnosis. On this topic he has published extensively, given several talks and managed international and national research projects. He is currently Editor in Chief of the IFAC journal Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems; Senior Editor of the IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control; and Department Editor of the journal Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, having previously served in the editorial board of several journals including the IEEE Trans. on Control Systems Technology and the European Journal of Control. He has served for the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC) as chair of the IFAC Technical Committee 1.3 on Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems (2008-11 and 2011-14) and is a member of the IFAC Publications Committee (since 2014). He is a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) for contributions to discrete event and hybrid systems. He has served the IEEE Control Systems Society in the role of General Chair of CDC 2016, member of the Board of Governors (2013-15) and Chapter Activities chair of the Member Activities Board (2006-13).
Christoforos N. Hadjicostis received the S.B. degrees in electrical engineering, computer science and engineering, and in mathematics, the M.Eng. degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1995, and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering and computer science in 1999, all from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge. In 1999, he joined the Faculty at the University of Illinois at Urbana--Champaign, where he served as Assistant and then Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the Coordinated Science Laboratory, and the Information Trust Institute. Since 2007, he has been with the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Cyprus, where he is currently Professor and Dean of Engineering. His research focuses on fault diagnosis and tolerance in distributed dynamic systems, error control coding, monitoring, diagnosis and control of large-scale discrete-event systems, and applications to network security, anomaly detection, energy distribution systems, medical diagnosis, biosequencing, and genetic regulatory models. He currently serves as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Automatica, IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, and the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems; he has also served as Associate Editor of IEEE Transactions on Control Systems Technology, and IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems I.
Stéphane Lafortune is a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. He was born in Montréal, Québec, Canada, and obtained his degrees from École Polytechnique de Montréal (B.Eng), McGill University (M.Eng), and the University of California at Berkeley (PhD), all in electrical engineering. Since joining the University of Michigan in 1986, he has held administrative positions twice, as Associate Chair of EECS (2000-2003) and Associate Chair of Graduate Affairs in ECE (2011-2014). Lafortune is a Fellow of IEEE (1999) and of IFAC (2017). He received the George S. Axelby Outstanding Paper Award from the IEEE Control Systems Society twice, in 1994 (for a paper co-authored with S.-L. Chung and F. Lin) and in 2001 (for a paper co-authored with G. Barrett). He was also recipient of the Presidential Young Investigator Award from the US National Science Foundation in 1990. Lafortune’s research interests are in discrete event systems and include multiple problem domains: modeling, diagnosis, control, optimization, and applications to computer and software systems. He has supervised or co-supervised 20 PhD graduates since 1986. He co-authored, with C. Cassandras, the textbook Introduction to Discrete Event Systems (2nd Edition, Springer, 2008). He is the lead developer of the software package UMDES and co-developer, with L. Ricker, of DESUMA. He has served as Editor-in-Chief of the journal Discrete Event Dynamic Systems: Theory and Applications since 2015. Lafortune’s publications are available from his Google Scholar profile.
Necmiye Ozay received the B.S. degree from Bogazici University, Istanbul in 2004, the M.S. degree from the Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA, in 2006, and the Ph.D. degree from Northeastern University, Boston, MA, in 2010, all in electrical engineering. She was a postdoctoral scholar with the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, CA, from 2010 to 2013. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science with the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include dynamical systems, control, optimization, formal methods with applications in cyber-physical systems, system identification, autonomy, and verification and validation. Prof. Ozay was the recipient of a DARPA Young Faculty Award in 2014 and an NSF CAREER Award, a NASA Early Career Faculty Award and a DARPA Director’s Fellowship in 2016. She serves as an Associate Editor for the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems since 2016.
Spyros Reveliotis is a Professor in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He holds a Diploma in Electrical Engineering from the National Technical University of Athens, Greece, an M.Sc. degree in Computer Systems Engineering from Northeastern University, Boston, and a Ph.D. degree in Industrial Engineering from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Dr. Reveliotis’ research interests are in the area of Discrete Event Systems (DES) theory and its applications. Central role in his work has the adaptation and application of DES theory to the control of the complex resource allocation functions that arise in the context of many contemporary applications: From the resource allocation that takes place in flexibly automated workflow systems, and the zone allocation in automated, guidepath-based material handling and other transport systems, to the lock allocation that takes place in multi-threaded software and the management of the ion-trap network that facilitates the physical realization of the elementary computational operations that take place in the context of quantum computing. Dr. Reveliotis is a Fellow of IEEE and a member of INFORMS. He has served on the editorial boards of many journals and conferences pertaining to his areas of interest, and his current appointments include a Senior Editor position for the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering, a Department Editor position for IIE Transactions, an Associate Editor position for the Journal of Discrete Event Dynamic Systems, and the position of the Editor-in-Chief for the Editorial Board of the IEEE Conference on Automation Science and Engineering (CASE). He has also served as the Program Chair for the 2009 IEEE CASE conference (2009), and the General Co-Chair of the 2014 edition of the same conference, and currently he is also a member of the Board of Governors of the American Automatic Control Council, representing the INFORMS Applied Probability Society. Dr. Reveliotis and his students have also been the recipients of a number of awards, with the most recent one being the 2014 Best Paper Award of the IEEE Trans. on Automation Science and Engineering.
Stavros Tripakis is a Full Professor at Aalto University, and an Adjunct Associate Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He received a Ph.D. degree in Computer Science in 1998 at the Verimag Laboratory, Joseph Fourier University, Grenoble, France. He was a Postdoc at UC Berkeley from 1999 to 2001, a CNRS Research Scientist at Verimag from 2001 to 2006, and a Research Scientist at Cadence Research Labs, Berkeley, from 2006 to 2008. His research interests include formal methods, computer-aided system design, and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Tripakis was co-Chair of the 10th ACM & IEEE Conference on Embedded Software (EMSOFT 2010), and Secretary/Treasurer (2009-2011) and Vice-Chair (2011-2013) of ACM SIGBED. His h-index is 44.