Cooperative Control Models Applications And Algorithms

During the last decades, considerable progress has been observed in all aspects regarding the study of cooperative systems including modeling of cooperative systems, resource allocation, discrete event driven dynamical control, continuous and hybrid dynamical control, and theory of the interaction of information, control, and hierarchy. Solution methods have been proposed using control and optimization approaches, emergent rule based techniques, game theoretic and team theoretic approaches. Measures of performance have been suggested that include the effects of hierarchies and information structures on solutions, performance bounds, concepts of convergence and stability, and problem complexity. These and other topics were discusses at the Second Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. Refereed papers written by selected conference participants from the conference are gathered in this volume, which presents problem models, theoretical results, and algorithms for various aspects of cooperative control. Audience: The book is addressed to faculty, graduate students, and researchers in optimization and control, computer sciences and engineering.

Cooperative, collaborating autonomous systems are at the forefront of research efforts in numerous disciplines across the applied sciences. There is constant progress in solution techniques for these systems. However, despite this progress, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve. Theoretical results are very difficult to come by. Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new, cutting-edge, ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, information flow, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 30 – February 1, 2008.

Across the globe, the past several years have seen a tremendous increase in the role of cooperative autonomous systems. The field of cooperative control and optimization has established itself as a part of many different scientific disciplines. The contents of this hugely important volume, which adds much to the debate on the subject, are culled from papers presented at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, in January 2007.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must! The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi neering.

A comprehensive review of the state of the art in the control of multi-agent systems theory and applications The superiority of multi-agent systems over single agents for the control of unmanned air, water and ground vehicles has been clearly demonstrated in a wide range of application areas. Their large-scale spatial distribution, robustness, high scalability and low cost enable multi-agent systems to achieve tasks that could not successfully be performed by even the most sophisticated single agent systems. Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems: Theory and Applications provides a wide-ranging review of the latest developments in the cooperative control of multi-agent systems theory and applications. The applications described are mainly in the areas of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs). Throughout, the authors link basic theory to multi-agent cooperative control practice — illustrated within the context of highly-realistic scenarios of high-level missions — without losing site of the mathematical background needed to provide performance guarantees under general working conditions. Many of the problems and solutions considered involve combinations of both types of vehicles. Topics explored include target assignment, target tracking, consensus, stochastic game theory-based framework, event-triggered control, topology design and identification, coordination under uncertainty and coverage control. Establishes a bridge between fundamental cooperative control theory and specific problems of interest in a wide range of applications areas Includes example applications from the fields of space exploration, radiation shielding, site clearance, tracking/classification, surveillance, search-and-rescue and more Features detailed presentations of specific algorithms and application frameworks with relevant commercial and military applications Provides a comprehensive look at the latest developments in this rapidly evolving field, while offering informed speculation on future directions for collective control systems The use of multi-agent system technologies in both everyday commercial use and national defense is certain to increase tremendously in the years ahead, making this book a valuable resource for researchers, engineers, and applied mathematicians working in systems and controls, as well as advanced undergraduates and graduate students interested in those areas.

Assuming only neighbor-neighbor interaction among vehicles, this monograph develops distributed consensus strategies that ensure that the information states of all vehicles in a network converge to a common value. Readers learn to deal with groups of autonomous vehicles in aerial, terrestrial, and submarine environments. Plus, they get the tools needed to overcome impaired communication by using constantly updated neighbor-neighbor interchange.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization have increasingly played a larger and more important role in many aspects of military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and decision making. At the same time, cooperative systems are notoriously difficult to model, analyze, and solve OCo while intuitively understood, they are not axiomatically defined in any commonly accepted manner. The works in this volume provide outstanding insights into this very complex area of research. They are the result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Fourth Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization held in Destin, Florida, November 2003. This book has been selected for coverage in: . OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings- (ISTP- / ISI Proceedings). OCo Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings). OCo CC Proceedings OCo Engineering & Physical Sciences. Contents: Mesh Stability in Formation of Distributed Systems (C Ashokkumar et al.); On the Performance of Heuristics for Broadcast Scheduling (C Commander et al.); Coupled Detection Rates: An Introduction (D Jeffcoat); Decentralized Receding Horizon Control for Multiple UAVs (Y Kuwata & J How); Multitarget Sensor Management of Dispersed Mobile Sensors (R Mahler); K-Means Clustering Using Entropy Minimization (A Okafor & P Pardalos); Possibility Reasoning and the Cooperative Prisoner''s Dilemma (H Pfister & J Walls); Coordinating Very Large Groups of Wide Area Search Munitions (P Scerri et al.); A Vehicle Following Methodology for UAV Formations (S Spry et al.); Decentralized Optimization via Nash Bargaining (S Waslander et al.); and other papers. Readership: Graduate students and researchers in optimization and control, computer science and engineering."

Before the appearance of broadband links and wireless systems, networks have been used to connect people in new ways. Now, the modern world is connected through large-scale, computational networked systems such as the Internet. Because of the ever-advancing technology of networking, efficient algorithms have become increasingly necessary to solve some of the problems developing in this area. "Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" focuses on computational issues arising from the process of optimizing network routes, such as quality of the resulting links and their reliability. Algorithms are a cornerstone for the understanding of the protocols underlying multicast routing. The main objective in the text is to derive efficient algorithms, with or without guarantee of approximation. Notes have been provided for basic topics such as graph theory and linear programming to assist those who are not fully acquainted with the mathematical topics presented throughout the book. "Mathematical Aspects of Network Routing Optimization" provides a thorough introduction to the subject of algorithms for network routing, and focuses especially on multicast and wireless ad hoc systems. This book is designed for graduate students, researchers, and professionals interested in understanding the algorithmic and mathematical ideas behind routing in computer networks. It is suitable for advanced undergraduate students, graduate students, and researchers in the area of network algorithms.