Self-organizing control of networked systems


Book Description

This thesis presents a novel distributed control paradigm for networked control systems in which the local control units of the subsystems exchange information, whenever this is necessary to fulfill an overall control aim. The local control units act in a self-organized way, which means that they adapt their communication structure depending on the current situation of the subsystems based on locally available information only. A new controller structure is proposed. The local control units are divided into three components fulfilling universal tasks to generate a situation-dependent communication structure: The feedback unit performs a local feedback by using local measurements to fulfill basic performance requirements. The observation unit detects the current situation of the subsystem by evaluating locally available information. The decision unit decides about the transmission of information from the corresponding subsystem to other local control units. Two self-organizing controllers for physically interconnected systems in which the local control units adapt the communication among each other depending on the current disturbances are introduced. Furthermore, three novel self-organizing controllers for synchronizing multi-agent systems within leader-follower structures by adapting the communication structure to situations like set-point changes, disturbances and communication faults are proposed. The concepts are applied in order to control a water supply system and a robot formation.




Impact Networks


Book Description

This practical guide shows how to facilitate collaboration among diverse individuals and organizations to navigate complexity and create change in our interconnected world. The social and environmental challenges we face today are not only complex, they are also systemic and structural and have no obvious solutions. They require diverse combinations of people, organizations, and sectors to coordinate actions and work together even when the way forward is unclear. Even so, collaborative efforts often fail because they attempt to navigate complexity with traditional strategic plans, created by hierarchies that ignore the way people naturally connect. By embracing a living-systems approach to organizing, impact networks bring people together to build relationships across boundaries; leverage the existing work, skills, and motivations of the group; and make progress amid unpredictable and ever-changing conditions. As a powerful and flexible organizing system that can span regions, organizations, and silos of all kinds, impact networks underlie some of the most impressive and large-scale efforts to create change across the globe. David Ehrlichman draws on his experience as a network builder; interviews with dozens of network leaders; and insights from the fields of network science, community building, and systems thinking to provide a clear process for creating and developing impact networks. Given the increasing complexity of our society and the issues we face, our ability to form, grow, and work through networks has never been more essential.




Self-Organizing Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems, IWSOS 2008, held in Vienna, Austria, December 10-12, 2008. The 20 revised full papers and 13 revised short papers presented were carefully selected from the 70 full and 24 short paper submissions from authors from 33 different countries. The papers are organized in topical sections on peer-to-peer systems, overlay networks as well as resource and service management.




Distributed Cooperative Model Predictive Control of Networked Systems


Book Description

This book is inspired by the development of distributed model predictive control of networked systems to save computation and communication sources. The significant new contribution is to show how to design efficient DMPCs that can be coordinated asynchronously with the increasing effectiveness of the event-triggering mechanism and how to improve the event-triggered DMPC for different requirements improvement of control performance, extension to interconnected networked systems, etc. The book is likely to be of interest to the persons who are engaged in researching control theory in academic institutes, the persons who go in for developing control systems in R&D institutes or companies, the control engineers who are engaged in the implementation of control algorithms, and people who are interested in the distributed MPC.







Self-Organizing Systems


Book Description

This book constitutes the thoroughly refereed post-conference proceedings of the 7th IFIP TC 6 International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems, IWSOS 2013, held in Palma de Mallorca, Spain, in May 2013. The 11 revised full papers and 9 short papers presented were carefully selected from 35 paper submissions. The papers are organized in following topics: design and analysis of self-organizing and self-managing systems, inspiring models of self-organization in nature and society, structure, characteristics and dynamics of self-organizing networks, self-organization in techno-social systems, self-organized social computation and self-organized communication systems.




Self-star Properties in Complex Information Systems


Book Description

This book is a spin-off of a by-invitation-only workshop on self-* properties in complex systems held in summer 2004 in Bertinoro, Italy. The workshop aimed to identify the conceptual and practical foundations for modeling, analyzing, and achieving self-* properties in distributed and networked systems. Based on the discussions at the workshop, papers were solicited from workshop participants and invited from leading researchers in the field. Besides presenting sound research results, the papers also present visionary statements, thought-provoking ideas, and exploratory results. The 27 carefully reviewed revised full papers, presented together with a motivating introduction and overview, are organized in topical sections on self-organization, self-awareness, self-awareness versus self-organization, supporting self-properties, and peer-to-peer algorithms.




Autonomic Network Management Principles


Book Description

Autonomic networking aims to solve the mounting problems created by increasingly complex networks, by enabling devices and service-providers to decide, preferably without human intervention, what to do at any given moment, and ultimately to create self-managing networks that can interface with each other, adapting their behavior to provide the best service to the end-user in all situations. This book gives both an understanding and an assessment of the principles, methods and architectures in autonomous network management, as well as lessons learned from, the ongoing initiatives in the field. It includes contributions from industry groups at Orange Labs, Motorola, Ericsson, the ANA EU Project and leading universities. These groups all provide chapters examining the international research projects to which they are contributing, such as the EU Autonomic Network Architecture Project and Ambient Networks EU Project, reviewing current developments and demonstrating how autonomic management principles are used to define new architectures, models, protocols, and mechanisms for future network equipment. - Provides reviews of cutting-edge approaches to the management of complex telecommunications, sensors, etc. networks based on new autonomic approaches. This enables engineers to use new autonomic techniques to solve complex distributed problems that are not possible or easy to solve with existing techniques. - Discussion of FOCALE, a semantically rich network architecture for coordinating the behavior of heterogeneous and distributed computing resources. This provides vital information, since the data model holds much of the power in an autonomic system, giving the theory behind the practice, which will enable engineers to create their own solutions to network management problems. - Real case studies from the groups in industry and academia who work with this technology. These allow engineers to see how autonomic networking is implemented in a variety of scenarios, giving them a solid grounding in applications and helping them generate their own solutions to real-world problems.




Mapping Biological Systems to Network Systems


Book Description

The book presents the challenges inherent in the paradigm shift of network systems from static to highly dynamic distributed systems – it proposes solutions that the symbiotic nature of biological systems can provide into altering networking systems to adapt to these changes. The author discuss how biological systems – which have the inherent capabilities of evolving, self-organizing, self-repairing and flourishing with time – are inspiring researchers to take opportunities from the biology domain and map them with the problems faced in network domain. The book revolves around the central idea of bio-inspired systems -- it begins by exploring why biology and computer network research are such a natural match. This is followed by presenting a broad overview of biologically inspired research in network systems -- it is classified by the biological field that inspired each topic and by the area of networking in which that topic lies. Each case elucidates how biological concepts have been most successfully applied in various domains. Nevertheless, it also presents a case study discussing the security aspects of wireless sensor networks and how biological solution stand out in comparison to optimized solutions. Furthermore, it also discusses novel biological solutions for solving problems in diverse engineering domains such as mechanical, electrical, civil, aerospace, energy and agriculture. The readers will not only get proper understanding of the bio inspired systems but also better insight for developing novel bio inspired solutions.




Network Information Systems


Book Description

This text presents a unique treatment of network control systems. Drawing from fundamental principles of dynamical systems theory and dynamical thermodynamics, the authors develop a continuous-time, discrete-time, and hybrid dynamical system and control framework for linear and nonlinear large-scale network systems. The proposed framework extends the concepts of energy, entropy, and temperature to undirected and directed information networks. Continuous-time, discrete-time, and hybrid thermodynamic principles are used to design distributed control protocol algorithms for static and dynamic networked systems in the face of system uncertainty, exogenous disturbances, imperfect system network communication, and time delays. Network Information Systems: A Dynamical Systems Approach is written for applied mathematicians, dynamical systems theorists, control theorists, and engineers. Researchers and graduate students in a variety of fields who seek a fundamental understanding of the rich behavior of controlled large-scale network systems will also find this book useful. This book can be used for a first course on control design of large-scale network systems, such as control protocols for network systems, network information systems, a dynamical systems approach to network systems, and network thermodynamic systems. The prerequisites are a first course in nonlinear systems theory and a first course in advanced (multivariable) calculus.