Control of system of systems

This paper sets forth the stage for one of the most important issues in SoS - the control problem. The challenge for any control engineer and designer is to stabilize the SoS based on not only its own sensors on board, but just as critically important based on data transmissions from other sensors and actuators. For that reason the control design needs to be flexible to account for lack or shortfall of communication packets from other systems or on the usual Gupta's [14] main contribution here is the simultaneous design of information flow and the control law. Unlike traditional control design tools which concentrate on calculating the optimal control input by assuming a particular information flow between the components, Gupta's [14] approach seeks to synthesize the optimal information flow along with the optimal control law that satisfies the constraints of the information flow. Thus besides the question of ‘What should an agent do?’, the questions of ‘Whom should an agent talk to?’, ‘What should an agent communicate?’, ‘When should an agent communicate?’ and so on also have to be answered. This idea is exactly what the decentralized formation control of Kumar Ray, et al. [4], which was briefly discussed.