Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Discrete-event systems are an important class of dynamical systems, featuring discrete state spaces and event-driven dynamics. To control a system involves influencing its behaviour to achieve a desired goal. The implementation of this influence requires the synthesis of devices (or controllers) that incorporate a variety of mathematical techniques. A decentralized or distributed control problem arises when the system requires more than one controller to achieve the desired system behaviour. Additionally, an exact solution may not exist without the introduction of communication between controllers.The contributions of the research program will provide new ways to model and control quantitative decentralized and distributed systems using more realistic communication protocols. In addition, the application of control theoretic and optimization techniques to service-oriented architectures will aid in the design of what has nobly been called the ""future internet"".