CAREER: Strategic decision-making for communication and control in decentralized systems

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This project aims to develop a strategic decision-making framework for communication and control in dynamic decentralized systems. Centralized dynamic decision-making problems have a long history in engineering, economics and mathematics literature. Many modern systems, however, involve networks of agents making decisions in an uncertain and dynamic environment. Such decentralized systems arise in diverse application domains: infrastructure systems like power, transportation and communication networks, sensing and surveillance systems like teams of autonomous vehicles or robots, as well as networks of inter-connected devices such as the internet of things. Such systems are characterized by presence of multiple agents/decision-makers that have incomplete information about their environment, limited abilities to communicate with each other and that still have to make decisions that may affect the overall system. These systems have to contend with two key aspects of decentralization: (i) Decentralization of information, and (ii) Decentralization of decision-making. The decentralization of information and decision-making creates the need for communication. This communication may be limited, unreliable and imperfect. Decision-makers need to adapt to their communication environment. On the other hand, communication itself may require decision-making such as deciding when and with whom to communicate and what information to communicate. Thus, communication and decision-making are intimately coupled in decentralized systems. The overarching goal of the proposed research is to investigate this interplay of communication and control/decision-making that arises in decentralized systems operating in dynamic and uncertain environments. The technological and societal impacts of the proposed research will come through the development of new theoretical tools for communication and control in decentralized systems that will impact many applications and industries including: sensing and surveillance systems, robotics, smart grid, communication networks, urban infrastructure maintenance, and cyber-physical security. The educational impact of the project will come through the training of graduate students and engagement with local high-school students through school visits and/or on-campus events.The focus of the proposed research will be on strategic decision-making which requires identification of decision strategies for agents that allow them to respond to real-time information about unfolding events in their environment in order to optimize the performance of a decentralized dynamic system. The proposed work will address fundamental questions regarding control and decision-making in decentralized systems operating in uncertain and dynamic environments. In particular, it will explore characterization and computation of decision strategies in the following domains: decentralized stochastic control with unreliable and imperfect communication among controllers, minimax decision and control problems in decentralized systems, joint optimization of real-time coding, communication scheduling and control strategies for decentralized control. The fruits of this research will potentially constitute an important step in the further understanding of the interplay of information, communication and decision-making in dynamic decentralized systems.