(7iq) Optimization-Based Control of Complex Process Networks: Application to Medicine and Energy Systems

Regarding my future research efforts, I intend to extend my computational work to modeling, estimation, control, and optimization of advanced chemical and biological processes with application to energy systems and medicine. Specifically, the intellectual objective of my future research is to develop a systematic model predictive control and optimization framework tailored for large-scale complex process systems with unknown transport-reaction mechanisms when the system's uncertainty plays a vital role. For example, the source of parametric uncertainties and unmeasurable unknown parameters in chemical and living systems, which necessitates applying such novel control and optimization approaches, is reaction rates, activation energies, fouling factors, and microbial and cell growth rates which are only approximately known via complex experiments and/or high-fidelity multiscale simulations. The proposed research in this category will cover the controller parameterization, regulation of the estimation error, adaptive law synthesis, closed-loop system stability and robustness for different types of desired system performances. I plan to investigate the nonlinear adaptive model predictive control problem by introducing extra degrees of conservativeness considering robust performance and closed-loop stability. The proposed research will introduce systematic computationally efficient process identification methods to estimate system parameters required by the model predictive control to compute the optimal control action subject to a continuous decrease in the identification error.

Teaching Interests:

I view teaching as an integral and very important part of my overall academic activity. I plan to actively participate in the enhancement of the entire undergraduate and graduate curriculum. Given my Chemical Engineering background and my experience as a teaching assistant, lecturer and lab supervisor in several undergraduate courses, labs and workshops at Sharif University of Technology, the Pennsylvania State University, University of Delaware, and University of Minnesota, I feel confident that I can effectively teach every course in the undergraduate Chemical Engineering curriculum, and I will be happy to do so. Given my expertise in the areas of process dynamics, control, design and applied mathematics, my immediate teaching plans concern the improvement and development of courses pertaining to process dynamics and control, process design, and analytical/numerical methods for solving chemical engineering problems.