Distributed Control of Networked Agent Systems: Theory and Applications

A great number of practical complex systems can bemodeled as networked agent systems. Typical examples include the distributed satellite systems, a group of robots, wireless sensor networks, and power grids. One critical topic within this context is to understand how globally cooperative behaviors of such systems can be emerged as a result of distributed local interactions which has recently receivedmuch attention from various scientific fields. The present special issue mainly focuses on the new distributed control approaches in networked agent systems as well as their potential engineering applications. It tries to not only explore the underlying mechanisms corresponding to various collective behaviors but also manipulate and even control these fascinating collective behaviors. Call for papers has been carefully prepared by the guest editors and posted on the journal’s web page, which has received a lot of attention from researchers in various scientific fields.This special issue has received 30 submissions on networked agent systems. All manuscripts submitted to this special issue went through a thorough peer-refereeing process. Based on the reviewers’ reports and the guest editors’ comments, 10 original research articles are finally accepted. The contents of accepted papers are summarized below.