Distributed Model Predictive Control AN OVERVIEW AND ROADMAP OF FUTURE RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES

Distributed and decentralized control systems have been studied for decades. Already in [1], a survey of decentralized control methods for large-scale systems published in the late 1970s, it was stressed that when considering large systems the presupposition of centrality fails to hold due either to the lack of centralized information or the lack of centralized computing capability. Hence, the concerns regarding the applicability of centralized control strategies are anything but new. Nevertheless, there have been changes that have radically transformed the way in which these concerns are faced by control engineers. In particular, the strong development since the late 1990s of information and communication technologies (ICTs), on the one hand, and computational power, on the other, have boosted the application of noncentralized control techniques to problems beyond the scope of a few decades ago, such as the control of traffic [2] or electricity networks [3], [4]. © 1991-2012 IEEE.