Cooperative Control and Optimization

Abstract

A cooperative system is defined to be multiple dynamic entities that share information or tasks to accomplish a common objective. Research on the control of cooperative systems dates back to the late 1980s, which has become a very active research area in recent years due to the efficiency and flexibility of such a system. Possible application areas range from military to civilian scenarios. These can include unmanned aircraft in search and rescue operations, military surveillance and attack missions, arrays of micro satellites that form a distributed large aperture radar, robots operating within a manufacturing cell, etc.1, 2 To achieve the full benefits of cooperative systems these complex systems probably require some form of optimal control. Communication is critical to cooperative control and optimization and this may be accomplished through active message passing or by passive observation. However, there are limits on the size and complexity of a system, and a centralized controller for overall optimization of the entire system may not be realistic. This makes the distributed or decentralized optimization and control approach very necessary, but there are real research difficulties. Moreover, a heterogeneous cooperative system may be more interesting as it can accurately reflect the organization and cooperation between different types of systems (like humans and machines). Some of the specific challenges of cooperative control and optimization include the uncertainty caused by inter-system communications and distributed operation, the system complexity due to the problem size and the coupling between tasks, and scalability to a potentially large collection of systems.3 While a wealth of challenges still exist, this area of study is blooming. The motivation for this special issue is to provide an overview of recent novel developments that help a basic understanding of the theory, modelling, and applications in cooperative control, including the use of optimization and related problems. We hope this special issue can provide some useful information for both researchers and practitioners who are devoted to the research of cooperative control and optimization. We also hope that this special issue can provide a cross-fertilization of ideas from a broad set of disciplines.