Preface
This book is devoted to the study of distributed control systems, a very promising research area given the current rapid development of technologies of micro-sensors, micro-motors, sensor networks and communication networks. The main feature of the book is to adopt a frequency-domain approach to cope with analysis and design problems in distributed control systems. Frequency-domain methods utilize frequency response properties of subsystems (agents) and communication channels to characterize the stability and other performance criteria of the entire system. By comparison with time-domain methods, it is usually assumed to be more convenient to use frequency-domain methods for analyzing the robustness of the system against noise and dynamic perturbations. It will be shown in this book that frequency-domain methods are also powerful in scalability analysis of distributed control system.
The book consists of three parts. The first part includes Chapters 1, 2 and 3, and describes common features and mathematical models of distributed control systems; it also introduces basic tools that are useful for further analysis and design of the underlying systems, such as graph theory, frequency-domain stability criteria, scalability analysis based on differential geometric properties of frequency response plots, etc. The second part includes Chapters 4 and 5, and the third part includes Chapters 6 and 7. The second part focuses on the distributed congestion control of communication ...
