Cooperative multi agent systems: distributed computation, estimation and control

3 December 2007 - 7 December 2007

Aims

Multi-agent systems are complex dynamical systems composed by a large number of basic simple systems interacting among themselves through a communication network. They arise as the natural models in different areas of engineering such as sensor and communication networks, autonomous unmanned vehicles, as well in biological context as animal cooperative aggregation and flocking. The study of such systems present several issues, among which are the analysis of the dynamics and the control strategy design. More specifically the problems which need to be considered in this framework consist in understanding how the overall system behavior is influenced by the local information coding and protocol and by the network architecture. The specificity and the difficulty in the study of these systems are mainly due to two facts. First, it is necessary to handle the large size of variables in the model due to the large number N of basic agents: the usual asymptotic analysis in time here naturally has to interact with the asymptotics in N. Second, the typical sparsness of the communication network creates a strong constraint to the design of efficient strategies for such systems: the achievement of objectives and the relative performance will be strongly dependent on such communication constraints. The workshop will focus on the most innovative mathematical methods proposed in the last few years for the analysis and design of such systems: Markov models, random graphs, replica methods, partial differential equations and transport theory. The workshop is particularly addressed to graduate students and reaserchers in mathematics, electrical engineering and physics with interests in control theory, dynamical systems, information theory, complex networks, probability models, statistical mechanics, but possibly also to reaserchers who have not been previously exposed to such disciplines. The workshop will in fact offer three tutorial courses which will provide a thorough introduction to the main mathematical tools necessary to tackle the problems considered in the workshop. Besides the tutorials, the workshop will consist of a number of high level technical talk sand of some more general talks given by young reaserchers.

The workshop is partially supported by the Department of Information Engineering of the University of Padova and by INDAM.