Staff Profile

I am an EPSRC Doctoral Prize Fellow in the School of Computing at Newcastle University. I am researching a project titled “Reliable AI-Enabled Design of Cyber-Physical Systems”.

My PhD thesis was “Model-Based and Data-Driven Formal Synthesis of Power Systems” supervised by Sadegh Soudjani, funded by an EPSRC Studentship. My research focused on the intersection of formal methods in computer science and control theory, applied to power system primary frequency regulation.

In 2019, I completed an integrated Masters degree in Computer Science (Security and Resilience) with 1st Class Honours also at Newcastle University. For the project and dissertation, I received 92%.

I have contributed to the international academic community with published works, conference presentations, program committee memberships, and paper reviews. Published works of particular note are conference works at European Control Conference (ECC), Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS), Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST), Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (HSCC), and a work in the Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems (NAHS) journal. I contributed two chapters to the book Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control.

At Newcastle University, I was previously the chair of AMBER (2019-2023), given multiple internal research presentations, and assisted widely by teaching as a demonstrator and with marking. I have experience with supervising PhD, MSc and BSc student projects. Alongside these, I have previously led the team for research communication and dissemination for the HyCoDeV Lab.

My research focuses on the intersection of formal methods, control theory, cyber-physical systems, and data-driven approaches. For my PhD thesis, I particularly considered power systems as my underlying application domain.

Selected Preprints:

Wooding, B., Horbanov, V., & Lavaei, A. (2024). PRoTECT: Parallelized Construction of Safety Barrier Certificates for Nonlinear Polynomial Systems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.14804. [Under Submission]

Wooding, B., Lavaei, A., & Soudjani, S. (2023). Formal Control of New England 39-Bus Test System: An Assume-Guarantee Approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:2307.03467. [Under Submission]

Selected Publications:

Wooding, B., & Lavaei, A. (2024). IMPaCT: Interval MDP Parallel Construction for Controller Synthesis of Large-Scale Stochastic Systems. International Conference on Quantitative Evaluation of SysTems (QEST).

Kazemi, M.*, Majumdar, R., Salamati, M.*, Soudjani, S., & Wooding, B*. (2024). Data-driven abstraction-based control synthesis. Nonlinear Analysis: Hybrid Systems, 52, 101467. (*equal contributions).

Schön, Oliver; Naseer, Shammakh; Wooding, Ben; Soudjani, Sadegh (2024). Data-Driven Abstractions Via Binary-Tree Gaussian Processes for Formal Verification. The 8th IFAC Conference on Analysis and Design of Hybrid Systems (ADHS).

Wooding, B., & Lavaei, A. (2024). IMPaCT: A Parallelized Software Tool for IMDP Construction and Controller Synthesis with Convergence Guarantees. In Proceedings of the 27th ACM International Conference on Hybrid Systems: Computation and Control (pp. 1-2). [Poster Presentation]

Wooding, B., Lavaei, A., Vahidinasab, V., & Soudjani, S. (2023). Robust Simulation Functions with Disturbance Refinement. In 2023 European Control Conference (ECC) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.

Wooding, B., Vahidinasab, V., Kazemi, M., & Soudjani, S. (2021). Control and management of active buildings. In Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control (pp. 161-192). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Wooding, B., Vahidinasab, V., & Soudjani, S. (2021). Operation and control of a population of active buildings at network level. In Active Building Energy Systems: Operation and Control (pp. 193-218). Cham: Springer International Publishing.

Wooding, B., Vahidinasab, V., & Soudjani, S. (2020). Formal controller synthesis for frequency regulation utilising electric vehicles. In 2020 International Conference on Smart Energy Systems and Technologies (SEST) (pp. 1-6). IEEE.