Market-based optimal control: a general introduction

Resource allocation problems occur in many technical systems. Dealing with large-scale complex systems, a distributed formulation and solution of the problem is helpful. Therefore, it is very interesting that in an ideal human economy, distributed resource allocation is performed also in rather complex environments. This leads to a solution method called market-based control that imitates the behavior of an economic system in order to solve the distributed resource allocation problem in technical systems. In this work we focus on the optimal control of dynamic systems. It is shown that such problems can be expressed as a special case of a distributed resource allocation problem. Thus the application of economic principles is possible which leads to a new solution method called market-based optimal control. The objective of this paper is a general introduction into the new method.