Optimal Control Theory: The Variational Method

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 2017,respectively. She joined the school of Beijing Institute of Technology as Associate Professor in August 2019. Before that, she was a research fellow in Automatic Control Laboratory, Department of Information Technology and Electrical Engineering, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland.

Her current research interests include decentralized optimization, game theory and auction mechanism design, with particular applications to smart grids, demand response and charging coordination of electric vehicles, dynamic and stochastic game, distributed optimization in distribution systems with high penetration of renewables, and learning methods for grid power management. She has published more than 30 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 etc.