Optimal Control Theory

Introduction.- Extrema of Functional via Variational Method.- Optimal Control via Variational Method.- Pontryagin's Minimum Principle.- Dynamic Programming.- Differential Games.- Discrete-time Optimal Control Problems.

Prof. Zhongjing Ma received the B.Eng. degree in the field of Automatic Control from Nankai University, Tianjin, China, in 1997, and the M.Eng. and Ph.D. degrees from McGill University, Montreal, QC, Canada, in 2005 and 2009, respectively, advised by Prof. Peter Caines and Prof. Roland Malhame. After a period of time, from January 2009 to September 2010, as a postdoctoral research fellow with Prof. Duncan Callaway and Prof. Ian Hiskens, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, he joined the School of Automation at the University of Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in September 2010, as Associate Professor. He is currently Director of Institute of Electrical Engineering. He is an IEEE senior member. His research interests lie in the areas of optimal control, optimization, auction mechanism design, game theory, decentralized optimization of large-scale systems, and their applications in the electrical power systems. He has published more than 50 technical articles in IEEE Trans. on Automatic Control, Automatica, IEEE Trans. on Control Systems Technology, IEEE Trans. on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics: Systems, Control Engineering Practice, IET Generation, Transmission & Distribution etc.

He has taught the one-semester graduate course of Optimal and Robust Control, for 9 years at Beijing Institute of Technology, which has been taken in English. He has published a monograph entitled as "Decentralized Charging Coordination of Large-scale Plug-in Electric Vehicles in Power Systems" in Springer Nature in March 2019. He has joined the editorial board of the journal of "Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems" of the Elsevier press from February 2018 and has served as Associate Editor since then. 

Prof. Suli Zou received the B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering and its Automation and the Ph.D. degree in Control Theory and Control Engineering from the Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China, in 2011 and