The Department of Data Science (DS) at City University of Hong Kong (CityUHK) hosted a DS Distinguished Seminar featuring Prof. Ying TAN from The University of Melbourne. Prof. Tan delivered a talk entitled “Extremum Seeking Control: Theory to Applications”, presenting recent advances in extremum seeking control and its practical impact across engineering systems.
In the seminar, Prof. Tan introduced Extremum Seeking Control (ESC) as a real-time optimisation and control methodology that can drive a system to the maximum or minimum of an objective function—often without requiring an explicit model or gradient information. She reviewed the historical development of ESC and illustrated its relevance through representative application scenarios, including performance optimisation in energy systems.
Prof. Tan then explained the fundamental mechanisms of ESC in both static input–output mappings and dynamic plants, and discussed how analysis tools such as averaging can be used to study convergence and stability of time-varying closed-loop ESC systems. She also highlighted recent developments in ESC, covering continuous-time designs, discrete-time optimisation algorithms, and constraint-aware frameworks.
The final part of the talk focused on model-guided ESC, which integrates model information into ESC architectures to improve convergence and practical performance. Prof. Tan further discussed its emerging applications in human–prosthetic interfaces, where model-based insights can enhance human–device interaction and overall user experience. The seminar concluded with an engaging discussion on convergence speed, robustness to noise, and opportunities to connect ESC with modern data-driven approaches.
