Cooperative Systems

Because of the clearly important role cooperative systems play in areas such as military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and economics, just to name a few, the study of cooperative systems has intensified. This book provides an insight in the basic understanding of cooperative systems as well as in theory, modeling, and applications of cooperative control, optimization and related problems.

This book presents comprehensive treatment of a rapidly developing area with many potential applications: the theory of monotone dynamical systems and the theory of competitive and cooperative differential equations. The primary aim is to provide potential users of the theory with techniques, results, and ideas useful in applications, while at the same time providing rigorous proofs. Among the topics discussed in the book are continuous-time monotone dynamical systems, and quasimonotone and nonquasimonotone delay differential equations. The book closes with a discussion of applications to quasimonotone systems of reaction-diffusion type. Throughout the book, applications of the theory to many mathematical models arising in biology are discussed. Requiring a background in dynamical systems at the level of a first graduate course, this book is useful to graduate students and researchers working in the theory of dynamical systems and its applications.

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 — 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: • Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings® (ISTP® / ISI Proceedings) • Index to Scientific & Technical Proceedings (ISTP CDROM version / ISI Proceedings) • CC Proceedings — 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. Keywords:Cooperative Systems, Cooperative Control;Optimization;Cooperative NetworksKey Features:25 chapters of creative approaches to modeling, analysis, and synthesis of cooperative systemsResearch results from top researchers in the field of cooperative systemsExciting insights to cooperative systems which have increasingly played a larger and more important role in many aspects of military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and decision making

This book, on the ergonomics of human−machine systems, is aimed at engineers specializing in informatics, automation, production or robotics, who are faced with a significant dilemma during the conception of human−machine systems. On the one hand, the human operator guarantees the reliability of the system and has been known to salvage numerous critical situations through an ability to reason in unplanned, imprecise and uncertain situations; on the other hand, the human operator can be unpredictable and create disturbances in the automated system. The first part of the book is dedicated to the methods of human-centered design, from three different points of view, the various chapters focusing on models developed by human engineers and functional models to explain human behavior in their environment, models of cognitive psychology and models in the domain of automobile driving. Part 2 develops the methods of evaluation of the human−machine systems, looking at the evaluation of the activity of the human operator at work and human error analysis methods. Finally, Part 3 is dedicated to human−machine cooperation, where the authors show that a cooperative agent comprises a know-how and a so-called know-how-to-cooperate and show the way to design and evaluate that cooperation in real industrial contexts.

The phrases the information superhighway and the the information societyare on almost everyone's lips. CSCW and groupware systems are the key to bringing those phrases to life. To an extent that would scarcely have been imaginable a few years ago, the contributions in this volume speak to each other and to a broader interdisciplinary context. The areas of ethnography and design, the requirements and principles of CSCW design, CSCW languages and environments, and the evaluation of CSCW systems are brought together, to bring to light how activities in working domains are really in practice, carried out. The aim above all is to do justice to the creativity and versatility of those whose work they aim to support.

The paradigm of ‘multi-agent’ cooperative control is the challenge frontier for new control system application domains, and as a research area it has experienced a considerable increase in activity in recent years. This volume, the result of a UCLA collaborative project with Caltech, Cornell and MIT, presents cutting edge results in terms of the “dimensions” of cooperative control from leading researchers worldwide. This dimensional decomposition allows the reader to assess the multi-faceted landscape of cooperative control. Cooperative Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems is organized into four main themes, or dimensions, of cooperative control: distributed control and computation, adversarial interactions, uncertain evolution and complexity management. The military application of autonomous vehicles systems or multiple unmanned vehicles is primarily targeted; however much of the material is relevant to a broader range of multi-agent systems including cooperative robotics, distributed computing, sensor networks and data network congestion control. Cooperative Control of Distributed Multi-Agent Systems offers the reader an organized presentation of a variety of recent research advances, supporting software and experimental data on the resolution of the cooperative control problem. It will appeal to senior academics, researchers and graduate students as well as engineers working in the areas of cooperative systems, control and optimization.

Cooperative Control of Multi-Agent Systems extends optimal control and adaptive control design methods to multi-agent systems on communication graphs. It develops Riccati design techniques for general linear dynamics for cooperative state feedback design, cooperative observer design, and cooperative dynamic output feedback design. Both continuous-time and discrete-time dynamical multi-agent systems are treated. Optimal cooperative control is introduced and neural adaptive design techniques for multi-agent nonlinear systems with unknown dynamics, which are rarely treated in literature are developed. Results spanning systems with first-, second- and on up to general high-order nonlinear dynamics are presented. Each control methodology proposed is developed by rigorous proofs. All algorithms are justified by simulation examples. The text is self-contained and will serve as an excellent comprehensive source of information for researchers and graduate students working with multi-agent systems.

The objective of the series Cooperative Systems is to publish monographs and contributed works containing state-of-the-art expository research covering all topics in the field of cooperative systems. In addition, the series will include texts and monographs which are suitable for graduate-level courses in engineering, business, applied mathematics, biomedicine, operations research, and computer science.