Problems concerning the cooperation of multiple entities seeking to achieve a global objective appear in an increasingly broader variety of situations, for instance arising from the interaction of agents that were designed to act autonomously (such as cars on a highway), or from systems built from the ground up according to the networked systems paradigm (such as uav's (unmanned autonomous vehicles) or auction systems). Along with this comes an increase in the variety of tasks such systems have to accomplish. While most of the extant work in decentralized control focuses on issues relating to agents having partial information about the state of the ensemble, this new landscape underscores the need to develop new control theoretic methods that give the objective of the ensemble a prominent role. The goal of this research is to develop new results and algorithms to address this need, within the context of what is termed 'multi-agent systems with localized objectives'. The novelty of the point of view adopted here thus lies in the handling of information: beyond restrictions on the information available to the agents about the state of other agents, we integrate in the analysis restrictions on the information available about the global objective of the system as whole.
Intellectual Merit
This research project will provide novel, systematic methods for the design and analysis of multi-agent systems where each agent knows only part of the global objective of the ensemble. To this end, new connections will be established between control design and various areas of applied mathematics such as computational abstract algebra and algebraic topology.
Broader impacts
The successful completion of this research program will provide tools that enable the design of decentralized control laws with localized objectives and foster their dissemination and adoption in real-world systems such as formations of vehicles or power networks. This research plan will blend tools from different engineering disciplines and will draw on data/problems stemming from a variety of experimental origins. Its implementation will moreover involve undergraduate and graduate students from across the spectrum of engineering.
