24,751 research outputs found
Survey of decentralized control methods
An overview is presented of the types of problems that are being considered by control theorists in the area of dynamic large scale systems with emphasis on decentralized control strategies. Approaches that deal directly with decentralized decision making for large scale systems are discussed. It is shown that future advances in decentralized system theory are intimately connected with advances in the stochastic control problem with nonclassical information pattern. The basic assumptions and mathematical tools associated with the latter are summarized, and recommendations concerning future research are presented
Deterministic Equations for Stochastic Spatial Evolutionary Games
Spatial evolutionary games model individuals who are distributed in a spatial
domain and update their strategies upon playing a normal form game with their
neighbors. We derive integro-differential equations as deterministic
approximations of the microscopic updating stochastic processes. This
generalizes the known mean-field ordinary differential equations and provide a
powerful tool to investigate the spatial effects in populations evolution. The
deterministic equations allow to identify many interesting features of the
evolution of strategy profiles in a population, such as standing and traveling
waves, and pattern formation, especially in replicator-type evolutions
Supply chain collaboration
In the past, research in operations management focused on single-firm analysis. Its goal was to provide managers in practice with suitable tools to improve the performance of their firm by calculating optimal inventory quantities, among others. Nowadays, business decisions are dominated by the globalization of markets and increased competition among firms. Further, more and more products reach the customer through supply chains that are composed of independent firms. Following these trends, research in operations management has shifted its focus from single-firm analysis to multi-firm analysis, in particular to improving the efficiency and performance of supply chains under decentralized control. The main characteristics of such chains are that the firms in the chain are independent actors who try to optimize their individual objectives, and that the decisions taken by a firm do also affect the performance of the other parties in the supply chain. These interactions among firmsâ decisions ask for alignment and coordination of actions. Therefore, game theory, the study of situations of cooperation or conflict among heterogenous actors, is very well suited to deal with these interactions. This has been recognized by researchers in the field, since there are an ever increasing number of papers that applies tools, methods and models from game theory to supply chain problems
Tight Bounds for Consensus Systems Convergence
We analyze the asymptotic convergence of all infinite products of matrices
taken in a given finite set, by looking only at finite or periodic products. It
is known that when the matrices of the set have a common nonincreasing
polyhedral norm, all infinite products converge to zero if and only if all
infinite periodic products with period smaller than a certain value converge to
zero, and bounds exist on that value.
We provide a stronger bound holding for both polyhedral norms and polyhedral
seminorms. In the latter case, the matrix products do not necessarily converge
to 0, but all trajectories of the associated system converge to a common
invariant space. We prove our bound to be tight, in the sense that for any
polyhedral seminorm, there is a set of matrices such that not all infinite
products converge, but every periodic product with period smaller than our
bound does converge.
Our technique is based on an analysis of the combinatorial structure of the
face lattice of the unit ball of the nonincreasing seminorm. The bound we
obtain is equal to half the size of the largest antichain in this lattice.
Explicitly evaluating this quantity may be challenging in some cases. We
therefore link our problem with the Sperner property: the property that, for
some graded posets, -- in this case the face lattice of the unit ball -- the
size of the largest antichain is equal to the size of the largest rank level.
We show that some sets of matrices with invariant polyhedral seminorms lead
to posets that do not have that Sperner property. However, this property holds
for the polyhedron obtained when treating sets of stochastic matrices, and our
bound can then be easily evaluated in that case. In particular, we show that
for the dimension of the space , our bound is smaller than the
previously known bound by a multiplicative factor of
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