一句话：提出种群控制问题：同一控制器对所有有限状态个体施加相同动作，能否在任意个体非确定性反应下同步驱动任意数量个体到目标状态。
论文引入一种新的控制场景：由有限状态系统建模的个体种群受到统一控制，控制器只能对所有个体施加同一动作，灵感来自酵母种群控制（只能改变所有细胞共享的环境）。研究同步问题：无论每个个体如何反应，控制器能否同步地将所有个体驱动到目标状态。每个个体用同一个非确定性有限状态自动机（NFA）表示，整个系统编码为二人博弈：Controller 选择动作，Agents 为每个个体消解非确定性。m 个个体对应 m-population game，由此提出参数化控制问题：Controller 能否对所有 m∈N 都控制 m-population game。该文是 Concur 2017 扩展摘要的期刊版，包含完整证明。
We introduce a new setting where a population of agents, each modelled by a finite-state system, are controlled uniformly: the controller applies the same action to every agent. The framework is largely inspired by the control of a biological system, namely a population of yeasts, where the controller may only change the environment common to all cells. We study a synchronisation problem for such populations: no matter how individual agents react to the actions of the controller, the controller aims at driving all agents synchronously to a target state. The agents are naturally represented by a non-deterministic finite state automaton (NFA), the same for every agent, and the whole system is encoded as a 2-player game. The first player (Controller) chooses actions, and the second player (Agents) resolves non-determinism for each agent. The game with m agents is called the m -population game. This gives rise to a parameterized control problem (where control refers to 2 player games), namely the population control problem: can Controller control the m-population game for all m in N whatever Agents does?Comment: This is a journal version of the extended abstract arXiv:1707.02058 which appeared in Concur 2017, together with proofs
@article{paperbot779,
title = {Controlling a population},
author = {Nathalie Bertrand and Miheer Dewaskar and Blaise Genest and Hugo Gimbert and Adwait Amit Godbole},
journal = {Logical Methods in Computer Science},
volume = {Volume 15, Issue 3},
year = {2019},
doi = {10.23638/lmcs-15(3:6)2019}
}