  As in almost every other branch of science, the major advances in data
science and machine learning have also resulted in significant improvements
regarding the modeling and simulation of nonlinear dynamical systems. It is
nowadays possible to make accurate medium to long-term predictions of highly
complex systems such as the weather, the dynamics within a nuclear fusion
reactor, of disease models or the stock market in a very efficient manner. In
many cases, predictive methods are advertised to ultimately be useful for
control, as the control of high-dimensional nonlinear systems is an engineering
grand challenge with huge potential in areas such as clean and efficient energy
production, or the development of advanced medical devices. However, the
question of how to use a predictive model for control is often left unanswered
due to the associated challenges, namely a significantly higher system
complexity, the requirement of much larger data sets and an increased and often
problem-specific modeling effort. To solve these issues, we present a universal
framework (which we call QuaSiModO:
Quantization-Simulation-Modeling-Optimization) to transform arbitrary
predictive models into control systems and use them for feedback control. The
advantages of our approach are a linear increase in data requirements with
respect to the control dimension, performance guarantees that rely exclusively
on the accuracy of the predictive model, and only little prior knowledge
requirements in control theory to solve complex control problems. In particular
the latter point is of key importance to enable a large number of researchers
and practitioners to exploit the ever increasing capabilities of predictive
models for control in a straight-forward and systematic fashion.
