Bin Xin

This book provides a concise and in-depth exposition of distributed control and optimization problems of multi-agent systems. The book integrates various ideas and tools from dynamic systems, control theory, graph theory, and optimization to address the special challenges posed by such complexities in the environment as communication delay, topological dynamics, and environmental uncertainties. In order to deal with the mismatched uncertainties and time delay, observer-based controller and sliding mode control are developed to achieve consensus control. When there is a leader or multiple leaders in the communication topologies, containment control is required. The book studies both state and output containment for nonlinear multi-agent systems with undirected or directed networks. Furthermore, event-triggered schemes are proposed to reduce communication and computation costs. Distributed optimization for multi-agent systems is an interesting topic that has attracted more and more attention due to its wide range of applications such as smart grids, sensor networks, and mobile manipulators. In distributed optimization, the goal is to optimize the global cost function, which is the sum of all local cost functions, each of which is known only by its own local agent. Distributed nonsmooth convex optimization for multi-agent systems based on proximal operators is developed to achieve distributed optimal consensus.

Metaheuristics for Resource Deployment under Uncertainty in Complex Systems analyzes how to set locations for the deployment of resources to incur the best performance at the lowest cost. Resources can be static nodes and moving nodes while services for a specific area or for customers can be provided. Theories of modeling and solution techniques are used with uncertainty taken into account and real-world applications used.The authors present modeling and metaheuristics for solving resource deployment problems under uncertainty while the models deployed are related to stochastic programming, robust optimization, fuzzy programming, risk management, and single/multi-objective optimization. The resources are heterogeneous and can be sensors and actuators providing different tasks. Both separate and cooperative coverage of the resources are analyzed. Previous research has generally dealt with one type of resource and considers static and deterministic problems, so the book breaks new ground in its analysis of cooperative coverage with heterogeneous resources and the uncertain and dynamic properties of these resources using metaheuristics.This book will help researchers, professionals, academics, and graduate students in related areas to better understand the theory and application of resource deployment problems and theories of uncertainty, including problem formulations, assumptions, and solution methods.

Metaheuristics for Resource Deployment under Uncertainty in Complex Systems analyzes how to set locations for the deployment of resources to incur the best performance at the lowest cost. Resources can be static nodes and moving nodes while services for a specific area or for customers can be provided. Theories of modeling and solution techniques are used with uncertainty taken into account and real-world applications used.The authors present modeling and metaheuristics for solving resource deployment problems under uncertainty while the models deployed are related to stochastic programming, robust optimization, fuzzy programming, risk management, and single/multi-objective optimization. The resources are heterogeneous and can be sensors and actuators providing different tasks. Both separate and cooperative coverage of the resources are analyzed. Previous research has generally dealt with one type of resource and considers static and deterministic problems, so the book breaks new ground in its analysis of cooperative coverage with heterogeneous resources and the uncertain and dynamic properties of these resources using metaheuristics.This book will help researchers, professionals, academics, and graduate students in related areas to better understand the theory and application of resource deployment problems and theories of uncertainty, including problem formulations, assumptions, and solution methods.

Multi-objective optimization problems (MOPs) and uncertain optimization problems (UOPs) which widely exist in real life are challengeable problems in the fields of decision making, system designing, and scheduling, amongst others. Decomposition exploits the ideas of ‘making things simple’ and ‘divide and conquer’ to transform a complex problem into a series of simple ones with the aim of reducing the computational complexity. In order to tackle the abovementioned two types of complicated optimization problems, this book introduces the decomposition strategy and conducts a systematic study to perfect the usage of decomposition in the field of multi-objective optimization, and extend the usage of decomposition in the field of uncertain optimization.