Distributional Control of Ensemble Systems

Ensemble control offers rich and diverse opportunities in mathematical systems theory. In this paper, we present a new paradigm of ensemble control, referred to as distributional control, for ensemble systems. We shift the focus from controlling the states of ensemble systems to controlling the output measures induced by their aggregated measurements. To facilitate systems-theoretic analysis of these newly formulated distributional control challenges, we establish a dynamic moment kernelization approach, through which we derive the distributional system and its corresponding moment system for an ensemble system. We further explore optimal distributional control by integrating optimal transport concepts and techniques with the moment representations, creating a systematic computational distributional control framework.