Professor Alessandro Astolfi from Imperial College London, UK, Visits the School of Mathematics at Renmin University of China and Delivers an Academic Lecture
Publication Time:2025-11-12
On February 7, 2025, Professor Alessandro Astolfi from Imperial College London, UK, was invited to visit the School of Mathematics at Renmin University of China. He delivered a cutting-edge academic lecture entitled “Pontryagin Meets Bellman: On Combining Pontryagin’s Principle and Dynamic Programming.” The lecture provided an in-depth exploration of the synergy between Pontryagin’s minimum principle and Bellman’s principle of optimality in optimal control theory, as well as their practical applications.
Lecture Overview
In his lecture, Professor Alessandro Astolfi pointed out that leveraging the interaction between Pontryagin’s minimum principle and Bellman’s optimality principle helps to reexamine optimal control problems. This approach not only allows the optimal feedback strategy to be characterized as a fixed point of a nonlinear static mapping, but also enables a similar characterization of the optimal co-state variables in finite-horizon problems. Furthermore, Professor Astolfi demonstrated how approximate optimal strategies can be efficiently computed through externally stable Hamiltonian systems, and highlighted the potential applications of this theory in areas such as solving algebraic Riccati equations, designing iterative learning algorithms, and differential games. His research provides a powerful tool for the optimal control of complex dynamic systems, combining theoretical depth with computational feasibility.
Event Response
The lecture attracted a large number of faculty and students from the School of Mathematics, who actively participated and engaged in lively discussions. Attendees showed strong interest in the new methods and their potential applications presented by Professor Alessandro Astolfi. The lecture was chaired by Professor Shen Dong from the School of Mathematics at Renmin University of China. Faculty and students conducted in-depth exchanges on related topics.
About the Speaker
Professor Alessandro Astolfi is a leading scholar in the field of control theory and a Fellow of the European Academy of Sciences. He currently serves as a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Imperial College London and has been recognized as an IEEE, IET, and IFAC Fellow. He is also the Editor-in-Chief of IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, a top journal in the field of automatic control. Professor Astolfi’s research interests include nonlinear control theory, adaptive robust control, model reduction, game theory, geometric control theory, and discontinuous stabilization. His pioneering contributions have had a profound impact on both control theory and engineering applications, and he has received numerous honors, including the Outstanding Paper Award from the International Federation of Automatic Control (IFAC).
