Lauren Fortier

Lauren Fortier is a graduate student in nuclear science and engineering creating verifiable supervisory control frameworks for autonomous nuclear power plant operations. Her research addresses a critical challenge: reducing operator dependence and staffing costs while building trust among regulators and industry stakeholders. She designed finite state machine-based supervisory controllers using MATLAB and Simulink for the MIT research reactor startup, validating performance against reactor simulators. Building on this work, she uses MATLAB’s Simulink and StateFlow for control system development and is extending her framework with Simscape for thermal-hydraulic modeling and the Optimization Toolbox for online decision-making. Her approach employs limited lookahead policies and optimization algorithms to enable dynamic, adaptive plant management beyond pre-generated procedures. As a MathWorks Fellow, Lauren will scale these finite state automata frameworks to higher-dimensional systems. Her methodology has the potential to extend beyond nuclear to industrial and aerospace applications, demonstrating how formal verification can enable autonomous systems.