Networked piecewise-affine control systems

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Networks are pervasive in our world. From migrating birds flying in formation, to social groups, wireless networks, world-wide web, the examples are endless. In particular, the area of control systems, which is the focus of this proposal, offers an important potential to understand, analyze, design and control networks that are self-organizing and fully autonomous. For these multi-agent networks, recent demands on performance and reliability have caused control engineers to move from the design of a single centralized controller to the design of several localized controllers. In this approach, each agent has a dedicated controller that shares information with controllers from other agents using the communication network. One of the main advantages of networked control with decentralized capabilities is that in case of one controller having a fault, the decentralized architecture of the network offers reliability to the system whereas if a single centralized controller fails it will put the entire system into jeopardy.