Don Grundel - Böcker

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.

Cooperative systems are pervasive in a multitude of environments and at all levels. We find them at the microscopic biological level up to complex ecological structures. They are found in single organisms and they exist in large sociological organizations. Cooperative systems can be found in machine applications and in situations involving man and machine working together.They have some common elements: 1) more than one entity, 2) the entities have behaviors that influence the decision space, 3) entities share at least one common objective, and 4) entities share information whether actively or passively. Because of the clearly important role cooperative systems play in areas such as military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and economics, just to name a few, the study of cooperative systems has intensified. This book provides an insight in the basic understanding of cooperative systems as well as in theory, modeling, and applications of cooperative control, optimization and related problems.

Across the globe, the past several years have seen a tremendous increase in the role of cooperative autonomous systems. The field of cooperative control and optimization has established itself as a part of many different scientific disciplines (military science, biology, communications, etc.). Nevertheless, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve.Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 31 – February 2, 2007.The works presented in this book are suitable for faculty, graduate students, and industrial researchers in the fields of optimization, control theory, electrical engineering, computer science, and mathematics.