A Distributed Approach to Dynamic Autonomous Agent Placement for Tracking Moving Targets with Application to Monitoring Urban Environments

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS • Special thanks go to my family in Egypt, especially my parents. No words can describe what you have been doing for me, and no words can describe how much I love you all. • I would like to sincerely thank my advisor, Dr. George Vachtsevanos, for his constant help and support throughout the doctoral program as an advisor and a father figure. Without your support and advice, I would not have gotten this work done. • I would also like to thank all of my committee members, especially Dr. Linda Wills and Dr. Bonnie Heck for their advice and for their comments and suggestions regarding the content of this thesis. • I would like to especially thank Dr. Jay Lee for closely following the progress of my research work, for providing valuable comments and suggestions that contributed to the quality of this thesis, and for giving me the opportunity to present my work in several occasions to the systems engineering research crowd. • I would like to thank all current and former members of the Intelligent Control Systems Laboratory's research and administrative teams, who gave me their support and help throughout the doctoral program. With your company and support, I was able to get this done. • Finally, I would like to thank all of my close friends. You have always been there for me to provide me with your invariable help and support, especially when times got rough. You also made the journey full of fun! iv TABLE OF CONTENTS