IEEE CSS Magazine features Malikopoulos, mechanism design theory

Readers can get acquainted with one of Cornell’s newest engineering faculty members and his insights into mechanism design theory in the February issue of IEEE Control Systems Magazine.

The latest issue features a profile on Andreas A. Malikopoulos, professor in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, and includes a review paper on mechanism design theory coauthored by Malikopoulos.

In the magazine’s “People in Control” section, Malikopoulos details his career path from General Motors and Oak Ridge National Laboratory to Cornell Engineering and the origins of his Information and Decision Science Lab, which is described as “the first-ever scaled (1:25) robotic city with more than 50 robotic cars, with the vision to advance the state of the art in emerging mobility systems.” The profile also details Malikopoulos’s research interests, his favorite teaching courses, and the promising opportunities he sees in the control field.

In the same issue, and with coauthor his former student, Ioannis Vasileios Chremos, who is now with the University of Michigan, Malikopoulos published “Mechanism Design Theory in Control Engineering,” a tutorial and overview of the fundamental principles of mechanism design theory with methods of control engineering applications in communication, power grid, transportation and security systems, among others.

In the piece, the authors write “…engineering applications of large-scale systems, which are dynamic in nature, impose rather crucial challenges to the theoretical framework of mechanism design and thus inspire novel new mechanisms that will circumvent some of the limitations of the theory. Over the last 10 years, there has been extensive research from economists and mathematicians in expanding the theory of mechanism design for dynamic systems. The goal, of course, is to improve the applicability of these mechanisms in real-life problems and translate the useful- ness of the theoretical insights into practice.”

Malikopoulos and his coauthor conclude that as new developments and applications are continuous, the next chapters of mechanism design in engineering and its true impact in solving big problems remain to be seen.