CSE Community Seminar | December 4, 2026

Abstract

Complex engineered systems can no longer be designed by optimizing components in isolation. In domains such as autonomy, mobility, and other society-critical infrastructures, system-level performance emerges from tightly coupled choices across hardware, software, control, operations, infrastructure, and policy. Moreover, these choices are distributed across abstraction levels and stakeholders, and the same subsystem is often both a system in its own right and a component of a larger one. This calls for a compositional approach to design: one that can represent interdependence, capture trade-offs across scales and disciplines, and remain computationally tractable.

In this talk, Prof. Gioele Zardini will present a framework for the compositional co-design of complex systems, drawing on optimization, control, and applied category theory. The central idea is to model components and their interconnections in a modular way, so that large design problems can be assembled, queried, and solved systematically from smaller ones. This perspective gives rise to a new class of compositional optimization problems, in which design trade-offs are expressed structurally and solved through algorithms that exploit interconnection and feedback, rather than collapsing everything into a monolithic formulation.

He will illustrate the framework through examples spanning autonomous systems and future mobility, showing how it supports task-driven design across levels: from the choice of algorithms and components in autonomous vehicles to the co-design of services, operations, infrastructure, and policies in intermodal mobility systems. These examples highlight how compositional design can unify heterogeneous models and objectives, enable collaboration across disciplines, and provide quantitative tools to reason about the societal impact of emerging technologies.

He will conclude by outlining ongoing efforts that extend this framework toward uncertainty-aware and adaptive design, including distributional formulations of co-design problems, online learning with embedded black-box components, and broader questions at the intersection of compositional optimization, strategic interaction, and multi-stakeholder system design.