CPS: Breakthrough: Design of Network Dynamics for Strategic Team-Competition

在过去的十年中，人们对大型网络系统的认识和兴趣越来越大，例如电力（智能电网）、通信、生物、社会和传感器网络。大量的研究集中在网络系统上，其主要目标是设计策略，通过这些策略，网络中的各个代理进行合作以实现协调的目标。研究较少的是竞争战略场景，其中代理可能在努力实现其目标时竞争，或者可能在团队中竞争，使用本地通信以实现本地协调目的。该项目考虑了两个对立团队的竞争战略领域，其动机是可以抽象地视为大量自主代理与敌对代理或对手团队之间的竞争的应用程序。一个主要的例子是控制由众多涡轮机组成的大型风力发电场的问题：每个旋转叶片都会产生下游尾迹，每个涡轮机都面临在复杂的空气动力学相互作用下设置适当转速的问题。协同控制问题是在邻近涡轮机的尾迹效应和难以预测的风速和风向变化的影响下，确定单个涡轮机的转速，使从风中提取的总能量最大化。在这个例子中，首席研究人员建议解决一个一般化的问题，即涡轮机被视为与大自然竞争，大自然不断地改变着每个涡轮机的风速。正在进行的分析和应用导向的研究工作将是在优化、数学系统理论、博弈论和聚类算法等跨学科活动的教育计划的发展。研究生和本科生都将参与其中，重点是在整个项目期间吸引来自代表性不足群体的学生参与研究活动。

Over the past decade there has been a growing awareness and interest in large networked systems such as those presented by power (smart-grid), communication, biological, social and sensor networks. A large body of research focused on networked systems has resulted where the primary goal has been the design of strategies by which individual agents in a network cooperate to achieve coordinated goals. Less studied are competitive-strategic scenarios where agents may be competing while trying to achieve their objectives, or may be competing in teams using local communications for local coordination purposes. This project considers the competitive-strategic domain for two opposing teams, motivated by applications that can abstractly be viewed as a competition between a large collection of autonomous agents, and an adversarial agent or team of adversaries. A primary example is the problem of controlling a large wind farm composed of numerous turbines: each rotating blade creates a downstream wake and every turbine faces the problem of setting an appropriate rotation speed under complex aerodynamic interactions. The cooperative control problem is to determine rotation speeds for the individual turbines that maximize the total collective energy extracted from the wind, under wake effects from neighboring turbines and difficult-to-predict variations in wind speeds and directions. In this example, the Principal Investigators propose to address a generalization of the problem where the turbines are viewed as competing against nature, which continually and adversarial changes the wind speed at each turbine. Ongoing with the analytical and applications-oriented research efforts will be the development of educational programs with interdisciplinary activities in optimization, mathematical systems theory, game theory and clustering algorithms. Both graduate and undergraduate students will be involved, with an emphasis on attracting students from underrepresented groups to participate in the research activities throughout the duration of the project.