Sensing, Control and Decision Making with Limited Actions

Professor Tamer Basar

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Coordinated Science Laboratory

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Urbana, Illinois, 61801

Abstract: Interaction between information/communication and control (with “control” interpreted in a broader context, including strategic decision making in teams and games) has been a dominating research topic for several decades. This interaction is in general a complex one because viewed as separate decision units each one could help the other to achieve an overall better performance: more information generally leads to better control performance, and a judicious use of control could improve the information content of transmitted messages. These dual roles are not always aligned, however, making sometimes the derivations of optimal solutions to team problems much more challenging than obtaining for example saddle-point solutions to similarly structured games. Regardless of these difficulties, which are inherent to stochastic decision problems with non-classical information, the common element in all these problems has been to find a satisfactory answer to the question of “what to send”, or equivalently “how to shape the information/sensor and control signals” so as to collectively meet a targeted objective.

With the emergence of remote control applications, where the plant-control and control-plant communications are conducted over a heterogeneous network, or applications that involve distributed agents over large networks, some nontraditional constraints have been imposed on designs, prompted by constraints on power usage and limits on available resources. The questions that are now being asked are not only “what to send”, but also “when to send”, given some constraints on the number of transmissions (which could include sensor signals, control signals, or communication between agents).

Following a brief overview of the classical paradigm of “what to send” and “how to shape”, this talk will discuss a mathematical framework wherein also the question of “when to send” can be given a precise meaning, and addressed along with the former. Solutions to these problems involve threshold-type policies with online dynamic scheduling and offline computation. This is a rich paradigm with relevance not only to remote control but also to multi-agent teams and games.

Friday, January 25, 2008

3:30 – 4:30 p.m.

Rm. 1500 EECS