This paper investigates a method for decentralized stabilization of vehicle formations using techniques from algebraic graph theory. The vehicles exchange information according to a pre-specified communication digraph, G. A feedback control is designed using relative information between a vehicle and its in-neighbors in G. We prove that a necessary and sufficient condition for an appropriate de...

Multirate digital decentralized control design is presented for linear timeinvariant systems with interaction between subsystems. The design technique, implemented in multirate digital control, eventually allows us to separately design controllers for each subsystem without considering interaction between them. The resulting closed-loop system with interaction between subsystems being eliminate...

DCAC is a practical OS-level access control system that supports application-defined principals. It allows normal users to perform administrative operations within their privilege, enabling isolation and privilege separation for applications. It does not require centralized policy specification or management, giving applications freedom to manage their principals while the policies are still en...

Many real-world systems contain uncertainties and with time-varying delays, also, they have become larger and more complicated. Hence, a new decentralized variable structure control law is proposed for a class of uncertain large-scale system with time varying delay in the interconnection and time varying unmatched uncertainties in the state matrix. The proposed decentralized control law for the...

A decentralized architecture is proposed for autonomous establishment and maintenance of satellite formations. Such an architecture does not require a central supervisor, as the spacecraft can cooperatively track planned maneuvers and trajectories in the face of disturbances and uncertainties, while processing only local measurement information. If the planned maneuvers and trajectories are the...

This talk is concerned with decentralized control problems and their optimal solutions. Such problems are increasingly important, especially in the context of networked control systems. In this talk, we first provide a brief review on information structures in decentralized control, and their characterization and comparison. We establish the connections with classical stochastic control problem...

The complexity of finding an optimal decentralized policy for a cooperative multi-agent system is known to be non-deterministically exponential. Agents in such a system try to maximize a single global utility function, and do not compete; nevertheless, computing the optimal strategies for these agents is intractable. In this paper, we relax the requirement of finding an optimal decentralized po...

Motivated by three applications which are under investigation at the Honeywell Research Laboratory in Minneapolis, we introduce a class of large scale control problems. In particular we show that a formation flight problem, a paper machine control problem and the coordination of cameras in a monitoring network can be cast into this class. In the second part of the paper we propose a decentraliz...

Supervision based on place invariants (SBPI) is an efficient technique for the supervisory control of Petri nets. In this paper we propose extensions of the SBPI to a decentralized control setting. In our setting, a decentralized supervisor consists of local supervisors, each controlling and observing a part of the Petri net. We consider both versions of decentralized control, with communicatio...

In this paper we propose an approach to the implementation of controllers with decentralized strategies triggering controller updates. We consider set-ups with a central node in charge of the computation of the control commands, and a set of not co-located sensors providing measurements to the controller node. The solution we propose does not require measurements from the sensors to be synchron...