About this role
PhD Position Control Theory for Self-Designing Digital Twins of Transportation Systems (Delft, NL, 2628 CD) Delft University of Technology (TU Delft) Design Posted on Sep 1, 2026 This PhD builds digital twins that design themselves, using formal control theory to configure and verify them, then puts that theory to work on transportation systems Job description On this PhD project you will delve into the growing field of digital twins for infrastructure systems, with a focus on transportation systems. Digital twins are high-fidelity simulations combining principle-based models and black-box/data-driven representations of physical systems. While essential for high-accuracy predictions and counterfactual analysis, they are inherently complex and difficult to analyze due to the lack of standardization and a unified design theory. This project will tackle this problem from a theoretical angle in three main ways: - You will develop a framework for the autonomous design of formal mathematical contracts, based on the system description and functional requirements. This will lead to the creation of abstract classes used to describe the digital twin. - You will then design methods for automatically choosing the right parametrization of controllers to autonomously configure them to the abstract classes, ensuring stability and performance based on the requirements and specifications, e.g. via federated, scenario/sampling-based contract compositions. - Additionally, you will theorize how to design and verify complex control policies such as MPC and RL. - Additionally, you will study the effect of interconnecting digital twins of different systems and the effect on their stability. You will be able to work towards improving our state-of-the-art advanced digital-twin of transportation systems (based on SUMO). You will work at the Delft Centre of Systems and Control (DCSC) and will be supervised by Carlo Cenedese & Manuel Mazo. TU Delft is ...