Coordination of linear multi-agent systems over digital networks

Project Leader: Girish Nair
Primary Contact: Girish Nair (gnair@unimelb.edu.au)
Keywords: agent based systems; communications and networks; networked control systems; sensor networks
Disciplines: Electrical & Electronic Engineering
Domains: Networks and data in society, Optimisation of resources and infrastructure

In this project, a  distributed coordination problem will be studied, where multiple agents cooperate over an errorless, digital network to keep an underlying linear dynamical system in a desired target region of operation, despite bounded dynamical and measurement noise.

What makes this topic challenging is that the agents’ data sets may not be “well-aligned”; consequently, some agents may have to take actions that sacrifice performance, in order to indirectly signal information to other agents through the global dynamics.This leads to a dual effect that generally complicates the problem.

This problem will be studied from the point of view of a recent nonstochastic theory of information for worst-case problems with bounded noise [Nair, IEEE Trans, Automatic Control, 2013; Nair, IEEE Conf. Decision and Control, Osaka, 2015]. By studying the nonstochastic information flows in these multi-agent systems,the aim will be to derive  criteria for control/coordination, possibly by extending the  “structural routability” conditions of [Nair, 2014].