Cooperative Systems – serie

A co-operative system is a collection of dynamical objects, which communicate and co-operate in order to achieve a common or shared objective. The co-operation of entities is achieved through communication; either explicitly by message passing, or implicitly via observation of another entities' state. As in natural systems, cooperation may assume a hierarchical form and the control processes may be distributed or decentralized. Due to the dynamic nature of individuals and the interaction between them, the problems associated with co-operative systems typically involve many uncertainties. Moreover, in many cases co-operative systems are required to operate in a noisy or hazardous environment, which creates special challenges for designing the control process. Considerable progress has been observed in all aspects regarding the study of co-operative systems including modeling of co-operative systems, resource allocation, discrete event driven dynamical control, continuous and hybrid dynamical control, and theory of the interaction of information, control, and hierarchy.Solution methods have been proposed using control and optimization approaches, emergent rule based techniques, game theoretic and team theoretic approaches. Measures of performance have been suggested that include the effects of hierarchies and information structures on solutions, performance bounds, concepts of convergence and stability, and problem complexity. These and other topics were discusses at the Second Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. Refereed papers written by selected conference participants from the conference are gathered in this volume, which presents problem models; theoretical results; and algorithms for various aspects of co-operative control.

This text involves reconfigurable control, which is the contemporary field of automatic control. It also combines fault diagnosis and reconfigurable control in one book. New theoretical results are presented and reinforced by simulations and illustrations. The book should be suitable for engineers, scientists, researchers and project teams, such as individuals in aerospace, aircraft, electrical, mechanical, systems and control engineering.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un­ questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran­ scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model­ ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must! The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi­ neering.

During the last decades, considerable progress has been observed in all aspects regarding the study of cooperative systems including modeling of cooperative systems, resource allocation, discrete event driven dynamical control, continuous and hybrid dynamical control, and theory of the interaction of information, control, and hierarchy. Solution methods have been proposed using control and optimization approaches, emergent rule based techniques, game theoretic and team theoretic approaches. Measures of performance have been suggested that include the effects of hierarchies and information structures on solutions, performance bounds, concepts of convergence and stability, and problem complexity. These and other topics were discusses at the Second Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. Refereed papers written by selected conference participants from the conference are gathered in this volume, which presents problem models, theoretical results, and algorithms for various aspects of cooperative control. Audience: The book is addressed to faculty, graduate students, and researchers in optimization and control, computer sciences and engineering.

The problem of fault diagnosis and reconfigurable control is a new and actually developing field of science and engineering. The subject becomes more interesting since there is an increasing demand for the navigation and control systems of aerospace vehicles, automated actuators etc. to be more safe and reliable. Nowadays, the problems of fault detection and isolation and reconfigurable control attract the attention the scientists in the world. The subject is emphasized in the recent international congresses such as IF AC World Congresses (San Francisco-1996, Beijing-1999, and Barcelona-2002) and lMEKO World Congresses (Tampere-1997, Osaka-1999, Vienna-2000), and also in the international conferences on fault diagnosis such as SAFEPROCESS Conferences (Hull-1997, Budapest-2000). The presented methods in the book are based on linear and nonlinear dynamic mathematical models of the systems. Technical objects and systems stated by these models are very large, and include various control systems, actuators, sensors, computer systems, communication systems, and mechanical, hydraulic, pneumatic, electrical and electronic devices. The analytical fault diagnosis techniques of these objects have been developed for several decades. Many of those techniques are based on the use of the results of modem control theory. This is natural, because it is known that fault diagnosis process in control systems is considered as a part of general control process. xxii In organization of fault diagnosis of control systems, the use of the concepts and methods of modem control theory including concepts of state space, modeling, controllability, observability, estimation, identification, and filtering is very efficient.