Christos Cassandras
Christos G. Cassandras is Head of the Division of Systems Engineering and Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at Boston University. He is also 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 over 300 refereed papers in these areas, and five books.
He has guest-edited several technical journal issues and serves on several journal Editorial Boards. He has 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 the 2012 President of the IEEE Control Systems Society (CSS) and has served as Vice President for Publications and on the Board of Governors of the CSS. He has chaired the CSS Technical Committee on Control Theory, and served as Chair of several conferences. He has been a plenary speaker at many international conferences, including the American Control Conference in 2001 and the IEEE Conference on Decision and Control in 2002, and 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 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.
“Building a Cyber-Physical Infrastructure for the ‘Smart City’: The Case of ‘Smart Parking’”
A significant amount of activities in the Center for Information and Systems Engineering (CISE) is directed at developing a cyber-physical infrastructure for urban environments and addressing fundamental problems that involve data collection, dynamic resource allocation, real-time decision making, safety, and security, with emphasis on a balanced understanding of both “physical” and “cyber” components. The talk will overview this effort based on a new Mobile Sensor Network paradigm (MSNET) designed for urban settings and on decision support methodologies for dynamic resource allocation purposes. The ongoing effort will be illustrated through the “Smart Parking” system we have developed. This system determines an optimal parking space for a driver for any given destination entered through a smartphone app. and then reserves the space for the driver. Optimal spaces are determined by solving a sequence of resource allocation problems as new requests arrive or the state of the environment changes. The optimality criterion combines proximity to destination with parking cost, while also ensuring that the overall parking capacity is efficiently utilized. Thus, besides the obvious convenience to drivers, the system reduces traffic, as well as fuel consumption and pollution. Our studies have demonstrated that time-to-park is reduced by 50% in high-traffic conditions and parking space utilization is increased by 10-20% over commercial guidance-assisted systems. We will describe our “Smart Parking” system as deployed in a Boston University parking facility.