Coordination Control Of Distributed Systems

This book describes how control of distributed systems can be advanced by an integration of control, communication, and computation. The global control objectives are met by judicious combinations of local and nonlocal observations taking advantage of various forms of communication exchanges between distributed controllers. Control architectures are considered according to increasing degrees of cooperation of local controllers: fully distributed or decentralized control, control with communication between controllers, coordination control, and multilevel control. The book covers also topics bridging computer science, communication, and control, like communication for control of networks, average consensus for distributed systems, and modeling and verification of discrete and of hybrid systems. Examples and case studies are introduced in the first part of the text and developed throughout the book. They include: control of underwater vehicles, automated-guided vehicles on a container terminal, control of a printer as a complex machine, and control of an electric power system. The book is composed of short essays each within eight pages, including suggestions and references for further research and reading. By reading the essays collected in the book Coordination Control of Distributed Systems, graduate students and post-docs will be introduced to the research frontiers in control of decentralized and of distributed systems. Control theorists and practitioners with backgrounds in electrical, mechanical, civil and aerospace engineering will find in the book information and inspiration to transfer to their fields of interest the state-of-art in coordination control.

Distributed Coordination of Multi-agent Networks introduces problems, models, and issues such as collective periodic motion coordination, collective tracking with a dynamic leader, and containment control with multiple leaders, and explores ideas for their solution. Solving these problems extends the existing application domains of multi-agent networks; for example, collective periodic motion coordination is appropriate for applications involving repetitive movements, collective tracking guarantees tracking of a dynamic leader by multiple followers in the presence of reduced interaction and partial measurements, and containment control enables maneuvering of multiple followers by multiple leaders.

Multiagent systems (MAS) are one of the most exciting and the fastest growing domains in the intelligent resource management and agent-oriented technology, which deals with modeling of autonomous decisions making entities. Recent developments have produced very encouraging results in the novel approach of handling multiplayer interactive systems. In particular, the multiagent system approach is adapted to model, control, manage or test the operations and management of several system applications including multi-vehicles, microgrids, multi-robots, where agents represent individual entities in the network. Each participant is modeled as an autonomous participant with independent strategies and responses to outcomes. They are able to operate autonomously and interact pro-actively with their environment. In recent works, the problem of information consensus is addressed, where a team of vehicles communicate with each other to agree on key pieces of information that enable them to work together in a coordinated fashion. The problem is challenging because communication channels have limited range and there are possibilities of fading and dropout. The book comprises chapters on synchronization and consensus in multiagent systems. It shows that the joint presentation of synchronization and consensus enables readers to learn about similarities and differences of both concepts. It reviews the cooperative control of multi-agent dynamical systems interconnected by a communication network topology. Using the terminology of cooperative control, each system is endowed with its own state variable and dynamics. A fundamental problem in multi-agent dynamical systems on networks is the design of distributed protocols that guarantee consensus or synchronization in the sense that the states of all the systems reach the same value. It is evident from the results that research in multiagent systems offer opportunities for further developments in theoretical, simulation and implementations. This book attempts to fill this gap and aims at presenting a comprehensive volume that documents theoretical aspects and practical applications.

Papers collected here, from a December 2001 workshop held at the University of Central Florida, examine topics related to process coordination and ubiquitous computing. Papers on coordination models discuss areas such as space-based coordination and open distributed systems, global virtual data stru

Papers collected here, from a December 2001 workshop held at the University of Central Florida, examine topics related to process coordination and ubiquitous computing. Papers on coordination models discuss areas such as space-based coordination and open distributed systems, global virtual data stru

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, COORDINATION 2013, held in Firenze, Italy, in June 2013, within the 8th International Federated Conference on Distributed Computing Techniques (DisCoTec 2013). The 17 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 42 submissions. The papers cover a wide range of topics including coordination of social collaboration processes, coordination of mobile systems in peer-to-peer and ad-hoc networks, programming and reasoning about distributed and concurrent software, types, contracts, synchronization, coordination patterns, and families of distributed systems.

Advanced Distributed Consensus for Multiagent Systems contributes to the further development of advanced distributed consensus methods for different classes of multiagent methods. The book expands the field of coordinated multiagent dynamic systems, including discussions on swarms, multi-vehicle and swarm robotics. In addition, it addresses advanced distributed methods for the important topic of multiagent systems, with a goal of providing a high-level treatment of consensus to different versions while preserving systematic analysis of the material and providing an accounting to math development in a unified way. This book is suitable for graduate courses in electrical, mechanical and computer science departments. Consensus control in multiagent systems is becoming increasingly popular among researchers due to its applicability in analyzing and designing coordination behaviors among agents in multiagent frameworks. Multiagent systems have been a fascinating subject amongst researchers as their practical applications span multiple fields ranging from robotics, control theory, systems biology, evolutionary biology, power systems, social and political systems to mention a few. Gathers together the theoretical preliminaries and fundamental issues related to multiagent systems and controls Provides coherent results on adopting a multiagent framework for critically examining problems in smart microgrid systems Presents advanced analysis of multiagent systems under cyberphysical attacks and develops resilient control strategies to guarantee safe operation