Abstract

Decentralized feedback systems have long been of interest to the controls community [2], [3], [20]. In recent years, research in decentralized control has been re-invigorated by interest in such applications as cooperative control of autonomous vehicle teams, data fusion in sensor networks, air traffic management, and virus-spreading control, among many others, see the overviews [15]–[18] and also e.g. the articles [6], [19], [23]. These numerous network-control applications are widely varied: they have vastly different scales, may consist of autonomous-but-sensing agents (like vehicle teams) or may be hardwired (like electric power systems), and require a wide array of control and/or algorithmic capabilities. What these varying applications make clear, however, is that new tools for designing decentralized controllers are badly needed: ones that permit highly limited components subject to delay and variation to complete intricate tasks by exploiting the network's topological structure. As the need for topology-exploiting decentralized controllers has become clear, efforts to understand the role of a network's topology in its dynamics upon control have been initiated, but the core design problem remains to be addressed.