The emergence of coordinated action between groups of interacting individuals or agents is a common feature of multi-agent complex systems in Nature and Technology. Often different groups of agents need to interact to control and tame their behaviour. Among these types of behaviour, a notable case of study is that of herding where a group of “active agents” (the herders or controllers) is assigned the task of corralling and drive another set of agents (the herd) towards a desired goal region and maintain them therein, or to make the herd follow a desired path or trajectory. In Nature this is precisely what shepherd dogs do when controlling the motion of a group of flocking sheep. In Applied Science similar herding tasks have applications in robotic exploration, search and rescue operations, surveillance and containment and, more recently, in the study of human cooperation and interaction. Currently, this problem is studied often assuming some simplifying properties such as that the target agents have a tendency to aggregate or flock with each other. Moreover it is often assumed that one or two agents are tasked with the goal of corralling the target agents without an explicit need to cooperate and share information in order to solve efficiently the problem. In this talk I will present recent work carried out by my group to model and analyse herding behaviour in complex systems in order to solve the herding control problem in the absence of some often made simplifying assumptions. After presenting the mathematical control problem of interest, I will discuss some of the solutions we proposed and investigate applications in human-machine cooperation and the emergence of coordinated behaviour in multi-agent systems.

Biography

Biography: Mario di Bernardo (SMIEEE '06, FIEEE 2012) is Professor of Automatic Control at the University of Naples Federico II, Italy and Visiting Professor of Nonlinear Systems and Control at the University of Bristol, U.K. He currently serves as Rector’s Delegate for Internationalization at the University of Naples and coordinates the research area and PhD program on Modeling and Engineering Risk and Complexity of the Scuola Superiore Meridionale, the new School of Advanced Studies set by the Italian Governement in Naples in 2019. On 28th February 2007 he was bestowed the title of Cavaliere of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic for scientific merits from the President of Italy. He was elevated to the grade of Fellow of the IEEE in January 2012 for his contributions to the analysis, control and applications of nonlinear systems and complex networks. He is currently serving as an elected member of the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society for the term 2023-2025. He has been nominated VP Technical Activities of the IEEE Control Systems Society for the term 2025-2026. In 2009, he was elected President of the Italian Society for Chaos and Complexity for the term 2010-2013. He was re-elected in 2013 for the term 2014-2017. In 2006 and again in 2009 he was elected to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. From 2011 to 2014 he was Vice President for Financial Activities of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society. In 2015 he was appointed to the Board of Governors of the IEEE Control Systems Society where he was elected member in 2022 for the term 2023-2025. He was Distinguished Lecturer of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Society for the two-year term 2016-2017. His research interests include the analysis, synchronization and control of complex network systems; piecewise-smooth dynamical systems; nonlinear dynamics and nonlinear control with applications to engineering and computational biology. He authored or co-authored more than 220 international scientific publications including more than 110 papers in scientific journals, a research monograph and two edited books. According to the international database SCOPUS (March 2024), his h-index is 53 and his publications received over 12,500 citations by other authors. In 2017, he received the IEEE George N. Saridis Best Transactions Paper Award for Outstanding Research. He serves on the Editorial Board of several international scientific journals and conferences. From 1st January 2014 till 31st December 2015 he was Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems: Regular Papers. He is Senior Editor of the IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems and Associate Editor of the IEEE Control Systems Letters, the Conference Editorial Board of the IEEE Control System Society and the European Control Association (EUCA). He was Associate Editor of Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems; the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Sytems I: Regular Papers from 1999 to 2002 and again from 2008 to 2010, and the IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems II: Brief papers from 2003 till 2008. He is regularly invited as Plenary Speakers in Italy and abroad. He was Program co-Chair of the European Control Conference 2019, Publicity Chair of the IEEE ISCAS Conference 2018 and has been organizer and co-organizer of several scientific initiatives and events and received funding from several funding agencies and industry including the European Union, the UK research councils the Italian Ministry of Research and University.