MSc Thesis Proposal
Multi-agent control of large-scale hybrid systems
Mentors: Rudy
Negenborn, Bart
De Schutter
Keywords: multi-agent control, hybrid systems
Description:
In this project we investigate the use of agents for the control of
large systems, like traffic, electricity, and logistic networks, which
can be modeled as hybrid systems. In multi-agent control a number of
agents tries to cooperatively solve a problem.
When using agents for control of large-scale systems, each agent is
assigned a certain subproblem. Agents have to solve their subproblems
in such a way that the performance of the overall system is optimal in
some way. They can in general only achieve this through coordination
with other agents.
Figure 1: A schematic representation of a hierarchical multi-agent
control framework.
Questions of which a selection may form the basis of a MSc project are:
- Given an overall system model, what are effective methods to
decompose the overall system model into smaller subsystems that do no
overlap one another?
- Given a set of smaller subsystems, what actions should an agent be
able to perform and to what information should it have access (through
for example measurements and communication)?
- Given a set of agents with preconfigured communication and action
skills, how should a set of smaller subsystems be assigned to these
agents?
- Given a set of agents with assigned subproblems, how should agents
interact with each other such that the overall performance is
optimal?
- The same questions can be posed when desiring a hierarchical
decomposition of the system in which the subproblems may overlap each
other (instead of a completely decentralized, non-overlapping
decomposition). When hierarchies are considered, is there a higher
performance than when considering a totally decentralized
architecture?
Solutions to the above problems may be found using techniques from control engineering, like model predictive control or hierarchical control, and/or techniques from computer science, like reinforcement learning, genetic algorithms, or datamining.
If you are interested in selecting this project as your MSc project,
please come along or send us an email for more information.
This page is maintained by
Bart De Schutter.