DynamIC – Dynamical Systems at Imperial College London (DynamIC)

Name	Title	Date	Time	Room
Thom Badings (University of Oxford)	Policy Synthesis in Stochastic Dynamical Systems: From Finite-State Abstractions to Neural CertificatesAbstract: Stochastic dynamical systems are ubiquitous in many areas of research and safety-critical engineering. To ensure their safety and reliability, we need to compute control policies that ensure the system behaves as intended. Here, we represent the intended system behavior as a formula in temporal logic. However, computing such policies is intractable due to the nonconvex and stochastic nature of the resulting optimal control problem. In this talk, I will present our recent work in two directions, to still synthesize policies that provably satisfy a given temporal logic formula. In part (1), we will generate a finite-state abstraction of the dynamical system and use tools from probabilistic model checking to compute a policy on this abstraction. In part (2), we will work directly on the dynamical system and train a neural network as a (Lyapunov-like) certificate that proves the satisfaction of the control task. Both of these approaches lead to sound but not complete algorithms for policy synthesis in stochastic dynamical systems. I will demonstrate the strengths and limitations of both approaches through numerical experiments and discuss the challenges for further research.	Tuesday, 1 July 2025	12:00	HXLY 145

DynamIC Workshops and Mini-Courses (Complete List)

Title	Date	Venue
CHAOS (Homoclinic Bifurcations, Strange Attractors, Arnold Diffusion, Fermi Acceleration, Solitons)	Sunday, 24 September 2023 – Friday, 29 September 2023	Nesin Math Village, Izmir, Turkey
Mini-Workshop on Heterodimensional Dynamics	Wednesday, 2 November 2022	Imperial College London

Name	Affiliation	Arrival	Departure	Host
Néstor Jara	Universidad de Chile	Monday, 17 March 2025	Saturday, 12 July 2025	Martin Rasmussen