(132e) The Knighthood of the Golden Feedback Loop

I was a student in Erik's group from 2011 through 2016. In that time, I had the opportunity to work in the field of formal methods, which can informally be described as the pursuit of rigorously proving whether or not a given system, subject to some well-defined assumptions, exhibits some desired behavior --- in the chemical processing industry, for example: "assuming physical properties in these ranges, this control system will prevent the reactor from overheating" or "given these assumptions about our suppliers, facilities, customers, and competitors, this operating policy will maximize our profit". My work with Erik, however, didn't focus on problems quite like those; in this talk, I will give an overview of some applications of formal methods in chemical engineering, alongside related work in other fields, with a look to where it might all be headed.