IFAC 2026 World Congress Open Invited Track

 

Safe, Fault-Resilient & Health-Aware Control Design and Learning

Open Invited Track — IFAC World Congress 2026, Busan, Republic of Korea

Download all details here.

Abstract: 

Industrial and mission-critical systems increasingly operate in closed-loop settings where safety, resilience, and adaptability are indispensable. Control frameworks must ensure not only stability and performance under nominal conditions, but also reliability under abrupt faults, progressive degradation, and model uncertainty. Research in Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC) and Prognostics and Health Management (PHM) highlights the importance of integrated approaches that embed health information directly into the control design and learning processes. Over the past decade, Health-Aware Control (HAC) has emerged as a promising paradigm, where predictions of system state of health, remaining useful life (RUL), or reliability are explicitly incorporated into feedback loops to prolong asset lifespan and maintain performance levels. At the same time, data-driven methods and Reinforcement Learning (RL) open opportunities for designing optimal and adaptive controllers without requiring exact system models. Yet, ensuring safety during both exploration and exploitation phases in learning remains an unresolved challenge. Safe RL extends traditional RL by embedding safety, stability, and robustness guarantees, enabling deployment in safety-critical applications. This invited session will gather leading researchers to present and discuss theoretical foundations, computational tools, and practical applications of safe, fault-resilient, and health-aware control design and learning.\\\\
Submission Code for Open Invited Track: 3583k

How to Submit

  • Everyone is welcome to submit a paper to this Open Invited Track!
  • Send us an email if you are interested: mayank-shekhar.jha@univ-lorraine.fr
  • Write your paper in the IFAC conference template
  •  Submit via PaperCept: Here
  •   Open Invited Track paper
  • Enter this code : 3583k
     

This Open Invited Track will bring together leading researchers in Safe Reinforcement Learning (RL), Fault-Tolerant Control (FTC), and Health-Aware Control (HAC) 

to advance theory and practice for trustworthy autonomy under faults, degradation, and uncertainty.

Domains of interest include: aerospace, robotics, energy & power systems, and industrial processes.

 

Key Themes

 

  • Safe Control Design & Learning – RL with safety guarantees; safe exploration; Control Barrier Functions (CBFs).

  • Fault-Resilient Control – Adaptive and robust FTC; redundancy, reconfiguration, and learning-based resilience.

  • Health-Aware Control (HAC) – Embedding prognostics, state of health, and RUL into controllers.

  • Model Predictive Control (MPC) – Robust & stochastic MPC under degradation; learning-based MPC.

  • Observers & Estimation – Neural observers, state estimation, prognostic-integrated estimation.

  • Multi-Agent & Distributed Systems – Coordination under degradation/faults; decentralized HAC.

 

Organizers

Mayank S. Jha

Université de Lorraine, CRAN, CNRS (France)

Chetan S. Kulkarni

NASA Ames Research Center (USA)

Olga Fink

EPFL (Switzerland)

Mohammed Chadli

Université Paris-Saclay, IBISC (France)

Vicenç Puig

UPC Barcelona (Spain)

How to Submit

Anybody is welcome to submit a paper to this Open Invited Track!

  1. Send us an email if you are interested: mayank-shekhar.jha@univ-lorraine.fr

  2. Write your paper in the IFAC conference template (LaTeX resources: https://www.latex-project.org/get/).

  3. Submit via PaperCept: https://ifac.papercept.net/conferences/scripts/start.pl

  4. Select “Open Invited Track paper” during submission.

  5. Enter this code (important!):

    3583k ← Copy this exactly.

  6. Your paper will undergo peer review and, if accepted, will be presented at IFAC 2026.

 

Relevance to IFAC Technical Committees

 

  • TC 6.4 — Fault Detection, Supervision & Safety of Technical Processes

    • Working Group — Health-Aware Control Design & Safe Learning for Safety-Critical Systems See Here

  • TC 6.2 — Sustainable Control of Energy & Power Systems

  • TC 2.4 — Optimal Control

  • TC 3.4 — Hybrid Systems

 

Contact

 

For questions about this Open Invited Track, please contact:

Mayank S. Jha — mayank-shekhar.jha@univ-lorraine.fr