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The Department of Mechanical, Materials, and Aerospace Engineering presents its fall 2025 seminar series featuring Stephanie Stockar, associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) at Ohio State University, who will present “Optimal Control and Energy Minimization in Large-Scale Systems: A PDE-Based Approach with Applications to Traffic Systems.” This seminar is open to the public and will take place on Wednesday, September 10, from 12:45–1:45 p.m. in room 104 of the Rettaliata Engineering Center.

Abstract

Mobility is undergoing a profound transformation, driven by advancements in automation, connectivity, and control. From autonomous vehicles to smart infrastructure, these technologies offer new levels of efficiency and coordination. Yet these performance gains often come at an energetic and societal cost: increased vehicle miles traveled, shifting and persistent congestion patterns, and deepening disparities in access to mobility. While new technologies promise reductions in per-vehicle energy use, they can inadvertently increase total energy demand at the system level, compounding infrastructure stress and environmental impacts. This talk explores the role of control theory, particularly PDE-based optimal control, in navigating the trade-offs between localized efficiency gains and their broader systemic consequences. Through finite-time optimal control for distributed parameter systems, we investigate how energy-aware control strategies can manage large-scale traffic systems under real-world constraints. The approach emphasizes in-domain control methods, such as variable speed limit strategies, to improve traffic flow and reduce energy consumption without requiring systemic overhauls. The talk also highlights recent efforts to integrate PDE and ODE models within a moving bottleneck framework, capturing complex interactions between individual vehicles and aggregate flow. These challenges highlight the need for scalable control architectures able to handle diverse users, changing conditions, and interactions across different transportation modes. Mobility’s future isn’t just about automation or cleaner vehicles. Real progress in sustainability and equity requires a systems perspective that integrates control theory with energy use, human behavior, and infrastructure constraints.

Biography

Stephanie Stockar received her Ph.D. in mechanical engineering from Ohio State University in 2013 and her B.S. and M.S. in mechanical engineering from ETH Zurich, Switzerland in 2007 and 2010, respectively. She is currently an associate professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering (MAE) at Ohio State University, and affiliated faculty with both the Center for Automotive Research (CAR) and Sustainability Institute (SI). Before joining the MAE department at OSU in 2019, she was an assistant professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering at Penn State University. Stockar conducts research in the areas of constrained optimal control for multi-scale, large-scale, and distributed parameter systems, playing a pivotal role in energy distribution and conversion processes in transportation and buildings. Her research approach is profoundly interdisciplinary, drawing from the theory of system dynamics and control, data-driven and artificial intelligence method, and intersecting with thermal and fluid sciences. Stockar’s work has been funded by Ford Motor Company, Stellantis, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy, and ARPA-E. Stockar is a 2021 NSF CAREER Award recipient, she earned the SAE Ralph Teetor Educational Award (2021), and the Ralph E. Powe Junior Faculty Enhancement Award in Engineering and Applied Science (2020).