No Arabic abstract
We study a multiscale approach for the control of agent-based, two-population models. The control variable acts over one population of leaders, which influence the population of followers via the coupling generated by their interaction. We cast a quadratic optimal control problem for the large-scale microscale model, which is approximated via a Boltzmann approach. By sampling solutions of the optimal control problem associated to binary two-population dynamics, we generate sub-optimal control laws for the kinetic limit of the multi-population model. We present numerical experiments related to opinion dynamics assessing the performance of the proposed control design.
A mean-field selective optimal control problem of multipopulation dynamics via transient leadership is considered. The agents in the system are described by their spatial position and their probability of belonging to a certain population. The dynamics in the control problem is characterized by the presence of an activation function which tunes the control on each agent according to the membership to a population, which, in turn, evolves according to a Markov-type jump process. This way, a hypothetical policy maker can select a restricted pool of agents to act upon based, for instance, on their time-dependent influence on the rest of the population. A finite-particle control problem is studied and its mean-field limit is identified via $Gamma$-convergence, ensuring convergence of optimal controls. The dynamics of the mean-field optimal control is governed by a continuity-type equation without diffusion. Specific applications in the context of opinion dynamics are discussed with some numerical experiments.
We propose a mean-field optimal control problem for the parameter identification of a given pattern. The cost functional is based on the Wasserstein distance between the probability measures of the modeled and the desired patterns. The first-order optimality conditions corresponding to the optimal control problem are derived using a Lagrangian approach on the mean-field level. Based on these conditions we propose a gradient descent method to identify relevant parameters such as angle of rotation and force scaling which may be spatially inhomogeneous. We discretize the first-order optimality conditions in order to employ the algorithm on the particle level. Moreover, we prove a rate for the convergence of the controls as the number of particles used for the discretization tends to infinity. Numerical results for the spatially homogeneous case demonstrate the feasibility of the approach.
We study the synthesis of optimal control policies for large-scale multi-agent systems. The optimal control design induces a parsimonious control intervention by means of l-1, sparsity-promoting control penalizations. We study instantaneous and infinite horizon sparse optimal feedback controllers. In order to circumvent the dimensionality issues associated to the control of large-scale agent-based models, we follow a Boltzmann approach. We generate (sub)optimal controls signals for the kinetic limit of the multi-agent dynamics, by sampling of the optimal solution of the associated two-agent dynamics. Numerical experiments assess the performance of the proposed sparse design.
In this article, we propose a new unifying framework for the investigation of multi-agent control problems in the mean-field setting. Our approach is based on a new definition of differential inclusions for continuity equations formulated in the Wasserstein spaces of optimal transport. The latter allows to extend several known results of the classical theory of differential inclusions, and to prove an exact correspondence between solutions of differential inclusions and control systems. We show its appropriateness on an example of leader-follower evacuation problem.
We reconsider the variational integration of optimal control problems for mechanical systems based on a direct discretization of the Lagrange-dAlembert principle. This approach yields discrete dynamical constraints which by construction preserve important structural properties of the system, like the evolution of the momentum maps or the energy behavior. Here, we employ higher order quadrature rules based on polynomial collocation. The resulting variational time discretization decreases the overall computational effort.