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.

The book is an edited collection. The background of the authors of the book includes:
control engineering, control theory, mathematics, communication networks, informatics, marine engineering, traffic engineering, engineering of automated vehicles, control of printers, etc. Jan H. van Schuppen is affiliated as professor emeritus with the Department of Mathematics of Delft University of Technology in Delft, The Netherlands where he still teaches and advises and is further active with his consulting company Van Schuppen Control Research in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, since his retirement in October 2012.

His research interests include: control of decentralized and distributed systems, control of hybrid systems, control of discrete-event systems, realization, system identification, control of motorway networks and modeling and identification of biochemical reaction networks.
He is Advising Editor of the journal Mathematics of Control, Signals, and Systems and in the period 2008--2011 was coordinator of the project Control for coordination of distributed systems which was financially supported by the European Commission.