Approximate Projection-Based Control of Networks

Modern infrastructures such as transportation and communication networks are large-scale systems with complex dependence structures between various sub-systems. Human-interpretable performance targets in such systems are often represented in terms of lower-dimensional projections of the high-dimensional state space. We consider the problem of designing control strategies for high-dimensional systems that lack a detailed model. To do so, we leverage the ability of copulas to represent dependant structures in high-dimensional data, and approximate the state space model through inverse sampling. We demonstrate the applicability of the control policies obtained from our methodology through a data-driven case study of controlling flight delays within the US air transportation network.