Cooperative networks have gained a tremendous amount of attention over the last several years because of their existence not only in biological, social and economic arenas, but because of direct applications in many more areas such as communications, robotics and military sciences. This volume reflects a cross-fertilization of ideas from a broad set of disciplines and creativity from a diverse array of scientific and engineering research.While the benefits of networks in general have been recognized for quite some time, the idea of cooperative networks has several novel implications. Because distributed processing by heterogeneous nodes promises significant increases in system capability, performance and efficiency, research has intensified with a breadth of promising applications. Topics in this volume include networks of unmanned vehicles in uncertain environments, networks subject to eavesdropping and jamming, optimal node task-allocation, network complexity analysis, cooperative search involving multiple unmanned vehicles, and cooperative communications in ad-hoc networks, optimal control and optimization in man-in-the-loop scenarios.A broad array of readers, including faculty, graduate students and researchers interested in optimization, computer science, engineering, the social and behavioral sciences and related applications in cooperative systems will find this volume of great value.
