Datum predavanja: utorak, 26.5.2026.
Vrijeme predavanja: 12h u B03

Mara Vlašić, UNIDU
Title: Control theory – from distributed control to twofold control

Abstract:
Control theory studies how to guide dynamical systems toward a desired 
objective while respecting physical or practical constraints. It 
provides mathematical tools to model a system’s evolution, influence 
it through control inputs and evaluate performance using a cost 
function to be optimized. It addresses a fundamental question shared 
across many scientific disciplines: how can we steer a system to 
achieve a desired objective while respecting physical, biological or 
technological constraints?
Many real-world processes – such as heat diffusion, fluid motion, 
population dynamics or chemical reactions – evolve over space and time 
and are described by partial differential equations. These lead to 
distributed control problems, where actions are applied across a 
spatial domain rather than at a single point.
Finally, I will present the idea of twofold control, which consider 
the joint optimization of both the control input and the initial state 
of the system. This approach leads to a richer optimization problem, 
offering increased flexibility, lower cost function and improved 
performance in applications where the initial configuration can be 
designed or influenced.