Applied Antifragility in Technical Systems: From Principles to Applications

The book purpose is to build a foundational knowledge base by applying antifragile system design, analysis, and development in technical systems, with a focus on traffic engineering, robotics, and control engineering. The authors are interested in formalizing principles and an apparatus that turns the basic concept of antifragility into a tool for designing and building closed-loop technical systems that behave beyond robust in the face of uncertainty.

As coined in the book of Nassim Taleb, antifragility is a property of a system to gain from uncertainty, randomness, and volatility, opposite to what fragility would incur. An antifragile system’s response to external perturbations is beyond robust, such that small stressors can strengthen the future response of the system by adding a strong anticipation component. The work of the Applied Antifragility Group in traffic control and robotics, led by the authors, provides a good overview on the current research status.

Cristian Axenie is High Tech Agenda Bayern Professor of Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Staff with the Center of Artificial Intelligence, and Research Group Leader of the Sensorimotor Processing Intelligence and Control in Efficient compute Systems Laboratory at the Technische Hochschule Nürnberg Georg Simon Ohm (Nuremberg Institute of Technology) in Nürnberg, Germany. After earning a Dr.Eng.Sc. in Neuromorphic Systems and Robotics from the Technical University of Munich, Dr Axenie held leading research and development positions with Huawei Research, Audi Konfuzius Institute Laboratory, and Technische Hochschule Ingolstadt in Germany. Dr Axenie has over 15 years of academic and industrial experience materialized in over 50 peer-reviewed publications and 14 patents.

Meisam Akbarzadeh is an Associate Professor in the Department of Transportation Engineering at Isfahan University of Technology in Iran. He earned a BSc in electrical engineering and a BSc in industrial engineering before obtaining his PhD in civil engineering. He is an Alexander von Humboldt foundation fellow and has spent research stays in ETH Zurich risk center, ETH Zurich DBAUG, EPFL LUTS, and IFISC. He has served as the head of department of transportation engineering and transportation research at the Isfahan University of Technology. He has published over 40 research papers and has led a handful of research projects.

Michail A. Makridis is the Deputy Director of the Traffic Engineering and Control group at ETH Zürich, Switzerland. Previously, he led the Transport and Traffic Engineering group at the Zurich University of Applied Sciences and was the scientific lead for the Traffic Modeling Group at the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission (EC). He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Vision from Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. His work emphasizes data-driven, physics-informed modeling and AI to enhance sustainability and traffic efficiency. In 2022, he received the JRC Annual Award for Excellence in Research from the EC. 

Matteo Saveriano is Associate Professor of Automatic Control and Group Leader of Robot Learning within the Interdepartmental Robotics Laboratory at the University of Trento in Trento, Italy. After earning a PhD from the Technical University of Munich in 2017, Dr. Saveriano was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), Germany. In 2019, he moved as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Department of Computer Science and Digital Science Center, University of Innsbruck, Innsbruck, Austria, where he started a Tenure Track Assistant Professorship in 2020. In 2021, he started a Tenure Track Assistant Professorship at the Department of Industrial Engineering, University of Trento in Trento, Italy. His research has been published in over 70 peer-reviewed publications in international journals and conferences.

Alexandru Stancu is a Lecturer in Robotics and Control Engineering at the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering and the Robotics and Autonomous Systems Group Leader at the Aerospace Research Institute, both at the University of Manchester, UK. He received a European Ph.D. degree (summa cum laude) in Control Engineering from Polytechnic University of Catalonia, Barcelona (Spain) in 2004, and held academic positions with “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galati and the University of Mons, Belgium. Dr. Stancu has authored and co-authored over 60 articles and secured over GBP 3M in research grant contracts. He has over 25 years of research experience. Dr. Stancu is also director and founder of Manchester Robotics ltd.