Anna G. Stefanopoulou
Q. How did your education and early
career lead to your initial and continuing interest in the control field?
Anna: I always liked powerful
machines, so learning how to control
them was the ultimate career dream. I
started with model-based control of big
marine engines and naval propulsion
and then moved to cars and trucks.
Beyond automotive powertrain control,
I have had the privilege to work a bit
on the thermal management of satellite
batteries and startup optimization of
stationary fuel cells for backup power.
Q. What are some of your research
interests?
Anna: The combination of mathematics and physics in the thrilling applications of the power and energy sector
are gratifying and full of rewards due to
their importance for the environment.
Most of my efforts are in the modeling
and parameterization phase, given that
I tend to work with novel processes and
systems so there are no existing mathematical models for control design. My
research portfolio is driven by the applications needs and not the theory or the
methodology. I am fortunate to be able
to collaborate with many control theory
experts when I formulate the problem,
and I can identify the most promising
methodology or the gap in existing
methodologies.
Q. Describe a course that you teach
related to control.
Anna: Three years ago, the U.S.
Department of Energy funded a group
of professors at the University of Michigan to develop courses on electrification education. Scott Moura, Hossam
Fathy, and I developed a Battery Controls course. The course is so popular that I offer it in-distance learning
modules for various companies all
over the world. Some of my students
are managers in large corporations,
some students are unemployed and
looking for a new opportunity in the
automotive sector, and a few students
have a significant coating of mathrust, and most of the students lack the
basic control background. Luckily the
intense interest in understanding and
innovating in battery management
systems aligns everybody after two to
three weeks, and the course becomes
very rewarding.
Anna with her daughter Katerina and husband Jim Freudenberg. (Photograph courtesy of Lino Guzzella.)
ising opportunities you see in the
control field?
Anna and Jason Siegel embedding distributed temperature sensors from General
Electric in Panasonic battery cells from a
Ford C-Max as part of an ARPA-E project.
Anna and lab mates feeling puzzled in front of a medium-duty diesel engine after an
abrupt shutdown.
Anna: I am very interested in estimation problems and sensor selection
since the measurements are crucial
for feedback control performance and
robustness but also dictate the cost in
terms of dollars.
Some of the most exiting problems
are switching (multimode) combustion in internal combustion engines
and distributed parameter systems.
Our theory has too many assumptions
to apply in a realistic problem.
Consider, for example, a battery pack.
The physics dictate and typical observability analysis will show that you need
to measure the voltage of each cell in the
pack, and the temperature every four
cells, which is too expensive! Can we do
better? How do we optimize constrained
resources under model uncertainty?
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/MCS.2014.2320358
Date of publication: 14 July 2014
Q. What are some of the most prom-
44 IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE » august 2014
What are the confidence levels of our
sensing allocation and estimation decisions? The fault detection and diagnostics
problem is also very pressing and a very
fertile area for the controls community.
Q. You are a committee member of a
National Academies Committee that
will assess the feasibility of and strategy for reaching a corporate-wide fuel
economy of 54.5 mi/gal by 2025. What
topics will your report cover?
Anna: The National Research Council invited me to help the committee
with the ubiquitous and increasing
influence of control technologies in
the modern automobile. The focus of
the committee is on fuel efficiency. I
was called to quantify the impact of
modeling, simulations, control, and
calibration on reductions of light-duty
vehicle fuel consumption. In the quest
to quantify and document the successes, I called many of the industrial
members from our Society for help.
Powertrain and vehicle control design
is an enabling technology and has documented impact on the transient performance, calibration time, robustness
against environmental conditions, and
finally safety. It has been harder, how-
»
TECHNICAL ACTIVITIES
»» Be a champion for the importance of research.
»» Make the assessment of the
research enterprise an annual
rather than one-time event.
»» Educate universities on the folly
of basing hiring and promotion
decisions on numerical indices of
journal impact factors or citations to papers.
»» Provide tools to check for plagiarism and index the originality of a
concept.
»» Develop effective methods to
locate relevant qualified potential collaborators.
Profile of Anna G. Stefanopoulou
• Current position: professor of the Departments of Mechanical Engineering
and Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering, University of Michigan.
• Past positions: technical specialist, Ford Motor Company, 1996–1997; assistant professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1998–2000.
• Contact information: Mechanical Engineering, University of Michigan CoE/
2044 WE Lay Auto Lab, 1231 Beal Ave., Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109-2133
USA, http://www-personal.umich.edu/~annastef/.
• IEEE Control Systems Society experience highlights: associate editor, IEEE
Transactions in Control Systems Technology, 2002–2010; member of various
IEEE Control Systems Society and American Automatic Control Council committees, 2004–present; Board of Governors, 2006–2009.
• Notable awards: NSF Career Award; SAE Ralph R. Teetor Educational
Award; IEEE Transaction Control System Technology Outstanding Paper
Award; ASME Dynamic Systems and Control Division Outstanding Young
Investigator Award; MIT Technology Young Innovator; ASME Gustus L. Larson Memorial Award; ASME Fellow; IEEE Fellow.
ever, to connect the controls with fuel
consumption. Most of the time, reductions in fuel consumption are attributed to novel hardware but the automation and optimization of the novel
hardware within the overall system is,
as Karl Åström said, the hidden technology. The report will be finalized in
early 2015 so I urge the readers of IEEE
Control Systems Magazine to contact me
if they have great stories to share!
Q. What are some of your interests
and activities outside of your professional career?
Anna: Traveling and goofing off
with my family!
Q. Thank you for your comments.
Anna: Thank you for the opportunity to talk to you.
(continued from p. 21)
These recommendations were not
intended as specific recommendations
for the IEEE as a whole. Rather, the recommendations are to those organizations that want to attract and support
researchers in the future, which is an
objective of TAB but may be less important in other parts of the IEEE. In addition to these recommendations, the
28-page white paper includes detailed
discussions of the various changes in
how research is generated and published. These discussions, and specific
comments made by participants at
these meetings, are interesting reading for anyone with a stake in research
publications. Topics include 1) frustrations with the current academic funding and research process, 2) the huge
apparent difference in literature search
tools used by different countries, and
3) postulations on how research and
publishing may be different in 2018
and 2023.
Reference
[1] B. Hebner, L. Creighton, and J. Keaton, “Implications of the Changing Research Enterprise,”
white paper, IEEE, Jan. 2014.
Richard D. Braatz
august 2014 « IEEE CONTROL SYSTEMS MAGAZINE 45