Control and coordination in hierarchical systems (original) (raw)

Coordination mechanisms in complex hierarchical systems

International Journal of Information and Decision Sciences, 2017

The objective of this article is to examine and comparatively analyse the models, methods and algorithms of coordination in the hierarchical systems, as well as to determine an optimal general approach to harmonise and accelerate the information flow between the different levels of the hierarchy. In these systems, changing the concept of optimality, so it is very difficult to find an adequate mathematical formulation of the problems and attach a reasonable meaning to the optimality notion. In particular, this paper formulated the coordination task, analysed and mathematically formalised by two groups the coordination algorithms in the multilevel hierarchical systems, including iterative and non-iterative algorithms. Both coordination methods have the role to transfer the information between the hierarchical sublevels and to accelerate the evaluation and implementation of an optimal solution for the control problem. The obtained results are intended to be used in contribution of decision support multilevel hierarchical systems under different conditions and with different systems complexity.

Hierarchical coordination

Proceedings. 5th IEEE International Symposium on Intelligent Control 1990, 1990

In this paper, we introduce the hierarchical coordination of independent systems modelled by automata in the Ramadge-Wonham (RW) framework. The setup features a high-level coordinator that regulates, in a common language, low-level operators to cooperate in achieving a common goal. Each low-level operator enforces a corresponding local control requirement , but must refer to the high-level for coordinating commands. It is shown that for delay-free systems, consistent feedback control is achieved, in the combined system of coordinator and local controllers.

Self-Organization In Hierarchical Systems

Journal of Social and Evolutionary Systems, 1995

Currently there are two movements emerging within systems theory in connection with biology: self-organization and hierarchy theory. They are treated together here because they represent polar oppositional perspectives. Self-organization is concerned with change viewed as from within a changing system; whereas hierarchy theory, in the form familiar to most systems workers, is an external& descriptive framework for dealing with constraints bearing on a system from multiple scalar levels. Hierarchy theory also deals externally, in another form (the specification hierarchy), with integrative levels as developmental stages within an ontogenetic trajectory. In this article we conclude that, although self-organization and hierarchies are incommensurable discourses, they could be taken to be complementary, each supplying what the other lacks in understanding systems.

Coordination and Control of Hierarchically Organized Interacting Agents

The International FLAIRS Conference Proceedings

The coordination and control of hierarchically organized interacting agents is an important issue in many applications, e.g., harbor or warehouse automation. A formalism of agents as hierarchical input/output automata is proposed. A system of interacting agents is modeled as the parallel composition of their automata. We extend the usual parallel composition operation of I/O automata with a hierarchical composition operation for refining abstract tasks into lower-level subtasks. We provide an algorithm to synthesize hierarchically organized controllers to coordinate the agents' interactions in order to drive the system toward desired states. Our main contribution regards the formal definition, the representation, the theorems about its properties (i.e., the parallel and hierarchical composition are distributive operations), and the synthesis algorithm, proved to be complete and correct.

Hierarchically consistent control systems

IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 2000

Large-scale control systems typically possess a hierarchical architecture in order to manage complexity. Higher levels of the hierarchy utilize coarser models of the system, resulting from aggregating the detailed lower level models. In this layered control paradigm, the notion of hierarchical consistency is important, as it ensures the implementation of high-level objectives by the lower level system. In this paper, we define a notion of modeling hierarchy for continuous control systems and obtain characterizations for hierarchically consistent linear systems with respect to controllability objectives. As an interesting byproduct, we obtain a hierarchical controllability criterion for linear systems from which we recover the best of the known controllability algorithms from numerical linear algebra.

Predictive coordination in two level hierarchical systems

Proceedings First International IEEE Symposium Intelligent Systems, 2002

AbstractNew optimization method, using Non-iterative coordination in multilevel systems is developed. Coordination with prediction is considered. Decision making for optimal resource allocation in a two levels system is worked out. Appropriate model for steady state optimization is derived. Analytical relations are given, which benefit the real time management of the two level control system. Index Termsdecision making, optimization methods, operations research, mathematical programming, system engineering