MARIE SKLODOWSKA-CURIE IF 2019 – EXPRESSIONS OF INTEREST: INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED MANUFACTURING TECHNOLOGIES - UNIVERSIDAD DE VALLADOLID

ABOUT THE ORGANIZATION

The University of Valladolid is one of the most important centers of Higher Education in Spain. It counts on four campuses -Valladolid, Palencia, Segovia and Soria, over 100 degrees, 29 doctoral programs (14 with Honor Mention) and 68 postgraduate degree, accredited international relations and prestigious research Centers. On average, nearly 25,000 students enroll each year, counts on more than 2,500 teachers and nearly 1,000 people dealing with administration tasks and other services. Over 60% of students do internships in companies and other institutions. It offers a comprehensive range of double international degrees, and promotes the transfer of research results.

The UVA has 300 km2 for researching activities, 5 buildings devoted exclusively to research, 4 Certified Laboratories Industry serving nearly 300 research laboratories, 19 research institutes and all departments needed. A landmark Lab-building (foundation 2014), called LUCIA (0% CO2 emissions; 0% energy consumption, with LEED Platinum certification and Green Certification), with 2,100 m2 for researching related to efficiency energy buildings and agrofood (nutrition, food and dietary laboratories).

The UVA manages around 180/year research projects financed through competitive public R+D+i calls (European, national or regional), and approximately 500 contracts and agreements aimed at the transfer of knowledge and technology, amounting to an average value of over fifteen million Euros per annum. Moreover, its researchers take part in almost 250 further projects and contracts managed by other institutions.

UVA has been taking part in a very active way in different European projects, at research or training level, during the last 20 years. There is a long experience in international projects developed by different groups of research in the University and different fields of knowledge.

ITAP (Institute of Advanced Manufacturing Technologies) is a research institute of the University of Valladolid with more than 32 academic members from several areas of knowledge. Most of them belong to the School of Industrial Engineering. There are also external members from some companies, private research and innovation centers and Hospitals. All of them work together in engineering projects, combining teaching work with research and technology transfer. The institute has shared spaces at the School of Industrial Engineering,including iseveral laboratories of Automation, Mechanical Engineering, Structures, Industrial Chemistry, Thermotechnics, Fluid Mechanics, etc. and offices for management and administration activities.

ITAP has a great potential for inderdisciplinary industrial research projects inthree main areas:

(1) modeling, simulation and control,

(2) robotics and computer systems, (3) environmental technologies.

The project is part of the first research area, where the group is working in new methods for improving the performance of complex systems such as electrical grids, transportation systems or smart cities.

RESEARCH / PROJECT DESCRIPTION

Control of distributed cyber physical social systems with multiple agents is a challenging problem. A cyber physical social system (CPSS) is a kind of common complex system that is constituted by a physical system, its social system including human beings, and the cyber system that connects both of them. These systems are composed of many agents, each of them with individual objectives that has to cooperate to get a social objective, then they are distributed CPSS. Among these systems, we can consider electrical grids, intelligent transportation systems, smart factories or smart cities. Since the decade of 2000s, a great research effort has been devoted to CPS in order to improve the controllability, efficiency and reliability of a physical system, such as vehicle collision avoidance or zero-net energy buildings systems. However, in many of these systems, the social part including human beings has been ignored.

We propose a CPSS research program that aims to integrate physical, computational and socioeconomic models in a manner that outperforms a system in which the three models are kept separate. We plan to combine game theory and mechanism design to develop new incentive-based strategies to model and control distributed CPSS. The social part of the system may be composed of a collection of agents and a system operator (SO). The agents may have individual objectives that are different of the social system objective. The SO establishes a social objective (social welfare) and supervises that the agents collaborate to maximize the social welfare. The social planner has the authority to reward or penalize the agent that participate in the strategy to control the CPSS, but deviates from the social welfare.

Mechanism design considers mechanism anticipator agents with private utility functions that are unknown to the system operator. However, existing work does not consider issues such as the cost functions of the agents being coupled, the operator being interested in a specific objective that is not the social welfare, and actions being implemented by the agents and not the operator all together. On the other hand, cost allocation methods based in cooperative game theory can consider coupled utility functions and actions being implemented by the agents, but they do not consider agents that anticipate the cost allocation rule and an operator that has a specific utility function.

In addition, most classical socioeconomic models assume that the human agents are rational. However, recent psychological studies have demonstrated that human agents make decisions based on prejudices, misperceptions or fake knowledge that go against the assumption of rational utility maximization. Irrational behavior has implications for formulating economic policies, so we plan to take into account the potential for irrationality in our models and evaluate the performance degradation of the maximal social welfare and design strategies that are robust to irrationality. In order to reduce sensitivity to irrational behavior, we propose providing true information and increasing transparency to the agents so that they can use this feedback to make correct decisions in future actions.

Description of the offer:

The offer is to collaborate in research activities combining game theory and mechanism design to develop new incentive-based strategies to model and control distributed cyber physical systems. We look for a researcher in Social Sciences and Humanities (SOC), or Economic Sciences (ECO) with mathematical skills or a mathematician (MAT) with knowledge in social sciences or economical sciences.

Work location(s):

Laboratory of modeling, simulation and control of ITAP, School of Industrial Engineering, University of Valladolid.

WHO CAN APPLY?

At the deadline for the submission of proposals (11/09/2019), researchers:

- shall be in possession of a doctoral degree or have at least four years of full-time equivalent research experience.

- must not have resided or carried out their main activities in the country of Spain for more than 12 months in the 3 years immediately prior to the abovementioned deadline.

Offer Required:

- PhD

CONTACT PERSON

General contact: Enrique Baeyens Lárazo

Email: enrbae@eii.uva.es

Tlf: (+34) 983 423 909

https://www.itap.uva.es/

Applications: documents to be submiTted

- CV

- Letter of motivation for applying