Ilia Shilov

Projects

  1. Welfarist control 2024–
  2. Automated vehicles in Zürich's mixed traffic 2026–
  3. Fair solar curtailment in Walenstadt 2025–
  4. Peer-to-peer electricity markets 2019–2023

Research programme · 2024–

Welfarist control

Automatic Control Laboratory, ETH Zürich

A controller that shares a scarce resource among people, such as road space or grid capacity, optimises a social welfare function, usually a plain sum chosen without argument. The programme asks which function is admissible, given what can be compared between the people affected, and turns the answer into a design procedure: fix the level of comparability, choose the function it allows, report both.

After OpenStreetMap, Hall, Zhang, Shilov, Nax, Bolognani, Welfarist Control Design

People

  • Ilia Shilov, leads the direction, ETH Zürich
  • Saverio Bolognani, group head, ETH Zürich
  • Heinrich H. Nax, co-author, University of Zurich
  • Ezzat Elokda, co-author, ETH Zürich
  • Sophie Hall, co-author, ETH Zürich
  • Jonas G. Matt, co-author, ETH Zürich
Other co-authors
  • Florian Dörfler, ETH Zürich
  • Emilio Frazzoli, Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zürich
  • Mingjia He, Institute for Dynamic Systems and Control, ETH Zürich
  • Stefania Ionescu, ETH Zürich
  • Gioele Zardini, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT
  • Kai Zhang, ETH Zürich

With

  • NCCR Automation, funding
  • Zurich Center for Market Design, University of Zurich

Done

  • A design procedure from comparability to social welfare function, in the OJ-CSYS paper and the CSM tutorial.
  • An invariant price of anarchy, with bounds from multiplicative smoothness (IFAC 2026, CDC 2026).
  • Fair curtailment as one Kalai–Smorodinsky rule with different reference points (PowerUp 2026).
  • Two applications with outside partners: the City of Zürich and the Walenstadt pilot.

Topics

6 papers

Online

Applied project · 2026– · applies welfarist control

Automated vehicles in Zürich's mixed traffic

City of Zürich, Road Safety Department · Expanded study for a pilot in spring 2027

The City of Zürich has to decide on what terms automated vehicles may enter streets shared with trams, buses, bicycles and pedestrians, where a rule that is safe and fast for one group of road users can be slow or unsafe for another.

With
Team
  • Ilia Shilov, leads the research team, ETH Zürich
  • Kimia Chavoshi, postdoctoral researcher, ETH Zürich
  • Stefania Ionescu, postdoctoral researcher, ETH Zürich
  • Lorenzo Fiaschi, postdoctoral researcher, ETH Zürich
  • Saverio Bolognani, group head, ETH Zürich
After OpenStreetMap

Timeline

  • Work on the project starts.
  • First results: a prototype.
  • An expanded study, in preparation for a pilot that starts in spring 2027.

Related paper

Online

News

Applied project · 2025– · applies welfarist control

Fair solar curtailment in Walenstadt

Distribution system operators and the households of a Walenstadt grid · Surveys and interviews running

When a low-voltage cable in Walenstadt is full on a sunny day, the grid operator has to turn down some of the rooftop solar. Someone has to decide whose, and the households have to find the rule fair. The pilot runs on a real grid with about 50 rooftop solar installations, together with Grid2050, an NCCR Automation initiative with a test community in Walenstadt.

With
  • Swiss distribution system operators
  • Zara Malgir, University of Basel, on the household survey and the interviews
Team
  • Ilia Shilov, leads the pilot, ETH Zürich
  • Pulkit Nahata, manager of Grid2050, ETH Zürich
  • Jonas G. Matt, collaborator and co-author, ETH Zürich
  • Saverio Bolognani, co-author, ETH Zürich
After OpenStreetMap, Matt, Shilov, Bolognani, PowerUp 2026

Timeline

Papers

Online

News

  • Paper on fair generation curtailment accepted at IEEE PowerUp 2026.
  • Paper on fair generation curtailment submitted to IEEE PowerUp 2026.
  • Walenstadt curtailment pilot started with Swiss distribution system operators.

Research programme · 2019–2023

Peer-to-peer electricity markets

École Normale Supérieure (PSL), Inria Paris and VITO

When households with solar panels trade electricity directly with each other, every trade still has to pass through the same distribution grid. The PhD modelled such markets as generalised Nash equilibrium problems coupled to the grid: when an equilibrium exists and how to compute it, and how it moves when households keep data private, avoid risk or buy forecasts.

After OpenStreetMap, Shilov et al., SmartGridComm 2023, NETGCOOP 2024

People

  • Ilia Shilov, doctoral researcher
  • Ana Bušić, supervisor, Inria Paris
  • Hélène Le Cadre, supervisor, then VITO, now Inria Lille
  • Anibal Sanjab, supervisor, VITO
  • Pierre Pinson, co-author of the forecast-market papers, Imperial College London

With

  • École Normale Supérieure (PSL)
  • Inria Paris
  • VITO / EnergyVille, Genk

Done

  • Existence and uniqueness of the variational equilibrium of the market with grid constraints, and a closed form for the price.
  • How much privacy costs when households report noisy private data (ORL 2021).
  • Risk-averse equilibria and risk-hedging contracts (2020, 2022).
  • Forecast markets coupled with peer-to-peer trading (2023, 2024).
  • 2021–2022: provided a peer-to-peer trading model with coupling constraints to the EU Horizon 2020 project EUniversal, through VITO.

Topics

7 papers, with the thesis

Online