Welcome to the Jan C. Willems Center for Systems and Control at the University of Groningen. On this site you will find information about the research activities, projects and experts in the field of Systems and Control in Groningen.
FARMLAB project funded by €2 million
FARMLAB, led by the University of Groningen researchers Saeed Ahmed and Bayu Jayawardhana, has been awarded €2 million from the NWO (Dutch Research Council) NXTGEN Hightech programme.
Together with Wageningen University & Research, TNO, Saxion University of Applied Sciences, and industry partners Green Dino, SMI Dokkum, Batenburg Beenen, DEMCON industrial systems, and ABdrone, the consortium will develop autonomous drones and ground robots for precision and regenerative agriculture, with real-world testing and national scaling ahead.
For more information see the university announcement.
Jaap Eising joins DTPA group
On January 1, 2026, Dr. Jaap Eising started his position as a Tenure Track Assistant Professor of AI in Control within the DTPA group. His research interests are understanding and designing learning architectures, aiming at the development of new data-based control methods for hard to model systems.
Jaap earned his MSc and PhD in Mathematics from the University of Groningen in 2017 and 2021 respectively. His doctoral thesis focused on the analysis of conically constrained dynamical systems and fundamentals of data-driven controls. Followed by the PhD was a position as postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, working on both data-based control and optimization. After this a he moved to ETH Zurich, where he became a senior scientist, expanding towards the links between controls, machine learning and algorithm design.
IFAC High Impact Paper Award for Arjan van der Schaft
Arjan van der Schaft together with his coauthors Romeo Ortega, Bernhard Maschke and Gerardo Escobar have been awarded the High Impact Paper Award 2026 for their paper “Interconnection and damping assignment passivity-based control of port-controlled Hamiltonian systems” which appeared in Automatica, Vol. 38, pp. 585-596, April 2002.
This paper marks the start of the theory of nonlinear passivity-based control of physical systems represented in port-Hamiltonian form. Characteristic feature of this theory, and of its applications in various physical domains, is that the obtained control laws are often intrinsically robust and have a direct physical interpretation in terms of energy. The paper received around 2000 quotations according to Google Scholar.
The presentation of the award will take place in the framework of the Opening Ceremony at the Busan IFAC World Congress on Sunday, 23 August 2026. This award is one of IFAC’s major awards and consists of a medal, certificate and prize money.
Bart Besselink receives ERC Consolidator Grant
The research proposal “Contracts for Control System Design (COCOS)” of Bart Besselink will receive 2 Mio € funding by the European Research Council (ERC). The ERC Consolidator Grant is a prestigious research funding program to support researchers who are in the early stages of their independent research careers and have demonstrated significant potential for conducting high-quality research. Bart proposes a new approach for control system design based on contracts, inspired by ideas from software design in computer science. He will develop a contract theory for control system design that includes techniques for the automatic design of component contracts aimed at optimizing system-level performance, and control design for contract satisfaction. The practical relevance of the theory will be tested by case studies in high-tech manufacturing systems and autonomous vehicles, and supported by efficient computational tools.
ECC 2024 pre-conference workshop
Bart Besselink is co-organizing the pre-conference workshop on “Modular Approaches for Design and Verification in Autonomous Driving” at the European Control Conference ECC (25-28 June, 2024) in Stockholm.
The main goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the challenges in autonomous system design, share recent developments in component-based methodologies for design and verification, and exchange ideas on topics including system engineering, (software) verification, and modularity. Aiming to strengthen the connections between industry and academia, the workshop includes speakers from both industry and academia and will be closed with a panel discussion. The workshop will be accessible for interested ECC participants and does not assume prior expert knowledge.
Michele Cucuzzella joins DPTA group as Associate Professor
Dr. Michele Cucuzzella has recently joined the Discrete Technology & Production Automation (DTPA) group within ENTEG as associate professor. His research will mainly focus on the design and analysis of nonlinear control systems with application to the energy domain and smart complex systems such as power systems, district heating, etc., contributing to the development of a more efficient and sustainable energy system.
Michele received the M.Sc. degree (Hons.) in Electrical Engineering and the Ph.D. degree in Systems and Control from the University of Pavia, Pavia, Italy, in 2014 and 2018, respectively. From 2021 to 2024 he was Assistant Professor of Systems and Control at the University of Pavia and guest Researcher at the University of Groningen. Since 2023 he is visiting Associate Professor at the Hiroshima University, Hiroshima, Japan. From 2017 until 2020, he was a Postdoc at the University of Groningen.
Bayu Jayawardhana new scientific director of DISC
Bayu Jayawardhana is appointed as of 1 January 2024 as scientific director of Dutch Institute of Systems and Control (DISC), the interuniversity research institute and graduate school that unites all university groups in the Netherlands that are active in systems and control theory and engineering. He succeeds Henk Nijmeijer (emeritus TU Eindhoven) who has himself been a graduate of the University of Groningen. Furthermore, Stephan Trenn has replaced Jacquelien Scherpen as the University of Groningen representative at the DISC board.
Veni grant for Dr. Henk van Waarde
Henk van Waarde has received an NWO Veni grant for his proposal “Kernel-based control theory of nonlinear systems”. Veni grants are part of the Talent Scheme by the Dutch Research Council. They are awarded to talented early-career researchers who have obtained their PhD in the last three years.
Jacquelien Scherpen new rector of the RUG
Our colleague Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen will be the new Rector Magnificus of the University of Groningen. The appointment which start at 1 September 2023 will be for four years.
Jacquelien Scherpen winner of Prince Friso Engineering Award 2023
Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen, Director of the Groningen Engineering Center, at the Faculty of Science and Engineering (UG), has been voted Engineer of the Year 2023 by the expert jury. She received the Prince Friso Engineering Award 2023 in the presence of Princess Beatrix. Scherpen was one of three finalists for the award, all of whom were women this year. The announcement and award ceremony hosted by the Royal Institute of Engineers (KIVI) took place 15 March 2023 at Boskalis in Papendrecht.
“It is a wonderful recognition, also of our efforts in Groningen to put engineering on the map,” Scherpen said. “As an engineer you stand at the basis of societal challenges and you tackle those as a team with other disciplines. That is what is special about the UG; we are a broad-based university where you can, for a long time now, also study engineering. I hope this will win over prospective students and in particular, provide extra motivation for women to study engineering and pursue a career in engineering!”
The jury commended Prof. Jacquelien Scherpen for her versatility which she couples with substantive depth. At the University of Groningen, Scherpen is a driving force in strengthening and broadening the research and teaching in the field of engineering. She works closely with businesses and also develops new programmes. The jury: ‘At the same time, she is also committed to the visibility of engineering in general, among other things by inspiring enthusiasm in young people for the engineering profession as well as overcoming gender stereotypes in female engineers. All in all, this makes her a role model for new generations of engineers.’
This was the ninth edition of the Prince Friso Engineering Award, which KIVI awards annually. Engineers who stand out in expertise, innovative capacity, entrepreneurship and social impact are eligible for the award, which is named after Prince Friso, who was an aerospace Engineer and member of KIVI. The winner of the award may call themselves Engineer of the Year. It has never happened before that the finalists only included women. In addition, an audience award, and the KIVI Engineering Student Team Award were also awarded.