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Sophie Hall

PhD Student at ETH Zurich (Switzerland)

November 10, 2025 at 4:00 PM PT -> my local time Add to Calendar

Location: online     Watch Live on Zoom / YouTube

Real-time Control of Critical Infrastructure in Times of Scarcity poster

This seminar will be fully online. Join us on Zoom (pw:123456) and YouTube.

Abstract

For decades, humanity operated under an illusion of abundance, exploiting oil, water, land and other planetary resources as if they were infinite. This paradigm is shifting as we confront resource scarcity. Automation technologies are deployed across critical infrastructure to optimize how energy grids, water networks, and transportation systems distribute finite resources efficiently.
In this talk, I will present three control perspectives and methods developed during my PhD that ensure efficiency, fairness, and welfare in closed-loop operation of large-scale infrastructure systems: (1) Game-theoretic MPC: An emerging control methodology modeling competitive self-interested agents with shared resources while incorporating predictions, dynamic models, and constraints into decision-making. I will present energy management results from a collaboration with a local DSO in Switzerland. (2) Welfarist control theory: A principled approach to aggregate incomparable heterogeneous cost functions, applied to water management. (3) Robust control techniques for maximal system efficiency in compute load allocations, developed with Google's Carbon Aware Computing team.

Speaker Bio

Sophie Hall is a PhD student at the Automatic Control Laboratory at ETH Zürich since May 2021, working in Prof. Dörfler's group. She completed her undergraduate studies in Mechanical Engineering focusing on medical control and signal processing at the University of Surrey, UK, and Nanyang Technological University, Singapore. In 2021, she obtained MSc in Biomedical Engineering from ETH Zürich specializing in modeling and control. During her master's studies, she conducted research on Gaussian processes for control in Prof. Zeilinger's group and worked on real-time MPC schemes in Prof. Dörfler's group. Her PhD research focuses on game-theoretic MPC, its theoretical closed-loop properties, as well as energy and groundwater applications.