CAREER: Distributed Control and Constraints Satisfaction in Complex Networked Systems

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This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). The research objective of this Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) project is to study the systematic analysis and design of distributed controllers that guarantee constraint satisfaction in large scale networked dynamical systems. The project will focus on networked systems where constraints have a fundamental role: their local violation can lead to a global network failure. For such class of systems the project will deliver a theory and algorithms for analyzing and designing in a systematic way distributed controllers which are predictive, model-based and explicitly take into account systems constraints. The concepts of ?model-based predictions?, ?communication of intent? and ?coordination rules?, widely used in social and biological networks, will be the three key elements in the overall research project development which will be used to guarantee global feasibility, stability and robustness of the network. If successful, the results of this research will provide a set of tools for the systematic analysis and design of distributed controllers with guarantees on performance and constraint satisfaction. This will eliminate the need of a lengthy and expensive trial and error design procedure required for achieving satisfactory performance and minimum constraint violation. Possible pplication areas include power networks, building management, homeland security, defense, transportation and environmental monitoring. Graduate and undergraduate engineering students will benefit through classroom instruction, involvement in the research and the design of an experiment in the PI?s laboratory.