Welfarist Control Design - How to fulfill the societal mandate in multi-agent control?
Abstract
At the core of most socio-technical systems lies a scarce resource that is allocated among agents: highway lanes, public transit, road space, water rights, energy access, grid capacity, user attention, pollution rights, etc. With further automation of the underlying allocation processes, control engineers are increasingly tasked with making decisive assumptions regarding what society wants. In practice to date, design choices are largely driven by industry norms and conventions rather than a result of conscientiously responsible and ethical design. In this paper, we look at tools available to control engineers to design systems in a more principled manner in order to match the societal mandate. We consider three control design paradigms: online feedback optimization, control of Markov decision processes, and model predictive control. Beginning with aggregating individual agents' preferences into control design objectives, subsequently ensuring and certifying the fulfillment of those specifications, we argue that the feedback nature of control systems enables appropriate allocation of the shared resources in ways hitherto unparalleled.
Related
- Control analysis and synthesis for general control-affine systems
- Dissipative Systems Analysis and Control. Theory and Applications: Erratum/Addendum. Springer Nature Switzerland AG, Communications and Control Engineering, Third uncorrected Edition, 2020
- Necessary and sufficient conditions for optimal control of coupled forward-backward stochastic control systems driven by G-Brownian motion
- Turnpike in optimal control and beyond: a survey
- Control of Neural Field Equations with Step-Function Inputs
BibTeX
@misc{hall2026welfarist,
title = {{Welfarist Control Design - How to fulfill the societal mandate in multi-agent control?}},
author = {Sophie Hall and Kai Zhang and Ilia Shilov and Heinrich H. Nax and Saverio Bolognani},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = nov,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2606.23931},
eprint = {2606.23931},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23931},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Welfarist Control Design - How to fulfill the societal mandate in multi-agent control?
AU - Sophie Hall
AU - Kai Zhang
AU - Ilia Shilov
AU - Heinrich H. Nax
AU - Saverio Bolognani
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/11/04
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2606.23931
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.23931
AB - At the core of most socio-technical systems lies a scarce resource that is allocated among agents: highway lanes, public transit, road space, water rights, energy access, grid capacity, user attention, pollution rights, etc. With further automation of the underlying allocation processes, control engineers are increasingly tasked with making decisive assumptions regarding what society wants. In practice to date, design choices are largely driven by industry norms and conventions rather than a result of conscientiously responsible and ethical design. In this paper, we look at tools available to control engineers to design systems in a more principled manner in order to match the societal mandate. We consider three control design paradigms: online feedback optimization, control of Markov decision processes, and model predictive control. Beginning with aggregating individual agents' preferences into control design objectives, subsequently ensuring and certifying the fulfillment of those specifications, we argue that the feedback nature of control systems enables appropriate allocation of the shared resources in ways hitherto unparalleled.
ER -