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MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowship: Apply with IMT Atlantique and join us!

Thinking about your next career step and willing to boost your career? Looking to experience intersectoral, interdisciplinary and international research? Wishing to carry out your research in a place addressing industrial, environmental, societal and digital transitions as a priority challenge?

Then apply for a Marie Sklodowska-Curie (MSCA) Postdoctoral Fellowship with IMT Atlantique as your host institution!

The MSCA Postdoctoral Fellowships (PF) provide funding to promising postdoctoral researchers with a view to develop their academic and transferable skills and enhance their career prospects by moving and working abroad.

By applying with IMT Atlantique you give yourself a chance to join a technological university ranked among the top 500 universities in the world according to the Times Higher Education (THE) World University's 2026 ranking (top 301-400 for Computer Science, top 201-250 for Engineering, top 301-400 for Physical sciences, and the 124th in the 2026 THE Interdisciplinary Science ranking, and top 51-100 for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence in the 2025 Shangaï ranking. IMT Atlantique is also awarded with the “Bienvenue en France” label, a recognition delivered by Campus France for our capacity to welcome and host international researchers in the best working conditions.

Topic open:

Hospital floor logistics - encompassing patient transport, medication delivery, sterile supply circulation, meal distribution, waste removal, and coordination of shared resources (elevators, corridors, carts) - constitutes a complex discrete-event system (DES). These processes are safety-critical, resource-constrained, and strongly coupled through shared infrastructure. Current optimization strategies often rely on heuristic scheduling or AI-based prediction methods, which may lack formal guarantees of safety, liveness, and deadlock-freedom.

This project proposes a formal, model-based alternative grounded in Supervisory Control Theory (SCT) of DESs and Petri Nets (PNs). The objective is to design provably correct, non-AI control architectures ensuring safe, conflict-free, and efficient hospital floor logistics under operational constraints.

The project aims to:

1. 1. Develop a formal Petri Net model of hospital floor logistics capturing:

• • Patient and material flows,
• • Resource allocation (staff, carts, elevators),
• • Spatial constraints (corridor segments, wards),
• • Priority policies (emergency vs. routine transport).

1. 
   
2. 2. Formulate operational specifications as formal control requirements, such as:

• • Mutual exclusion (no corridor congestion beyond capacity),
• • Deadlock avoidance (no circular wait involving elevators and transport teams),
• • Boundedness (finite buffer capacities),
• • Priority enforcement for emergency flows,
• • Nonblocking behaviour (guaranteed completion of admissible tasks).

1. 
   
2. 3. Synthesize maximally permissive supervisors using Supervisory Control Theory that:

• • Enforce safety and liveness constraints,
• • Guarantee controllability and observability,
• • Avoid unnecessary restriction of legitimate logistics operations.

1. 
   
2. 4. Validate the framework on a real hospital floor configuration after having tackled the complexity by abstraction and hierarchisation.

The expected contributions are:

1. • A formal reference architecture for hospital floor logistics based purely on DES theory.
2. • A systematic methodology for deadlock-free and congestion-free resource coordination.
3. • A modular supervisory control framework adaptable to hospital layout changes.
4. • A reproducible modeling template for other healthcare facilities.

Supervisors: Associate Prof. Naly Rakoto (naly.rakoto@imt-atlantique.fr), Associate Prof. Olivier Boutin (olivier.boutin@ls2n.fr), and Associate Prof. Claude Martinez (claude.martinez@ls2n.fr)

Keywords: Hospital Logistics, Supervisory Control Theory, Discrete-Event Systems, Petri Nets, Deadlock Prevention, Resource Allocation, Nonblocking Control.

Skills/Qualifications

The candidate should hold a PhD in Automatic Control or in Computer Science or schedule to defend his/her PhD before 1st August 2026. We are seeking excellent candidates with publications, that have worked in the scope of Supervisory Control Theory by Ramadge and Wonham (RW 1989).