Abstract
The Control community has recently witnessed an almost exponentially growing interest in the application of game-theoretic concepts and tools in research on control, multi-agent systems, and networks. In an interview with NSR, Professor Tamer Başar, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Swanlund Endowed Chair and CAS Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, former president of both the IEEE Control Systems Society and the American Automatic Control Council, and the founding president of the International Society of Dynamic Games, talked about the recently emerging role of game theory in control and networking research, how it broadens the territorial boundaries of control into disciplines outside engineering, and opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.
Highlights
The Control community has recently witnessed an almost exponentially growing interest in the application of game-theoretic concepts and tools in research on control, multi-agent systems, and networks
In an interview with NSR, Professor Tamer Basar, a member of the US National Academy of Engineering, Swanlund Endowed Chair and CAS Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, and Director of the Center for Advanced Study at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the USA, former president of both the IEEE Control Systems Society and the American Automatic Control Council, and the founding president of the International Society of Dynamic Games, talked about the recently emerging role of game theory in control and networking research, how it broadens the territorial boundaries of control into disciplines outside engineering, and opportunities and challenges that lie ahead
NSR: Could you tell us briefly what game theory is and what it deals with? Basar: Game Theory deals with strategic interactions among multiple decision makers, called players, with each player’s preference ordering among multiple alternatives captured in an objective function for that player, which she either tries to maximize or minimize
Summary
NSR: Could you tell us briefly what game theory is and what it deals with? Basar: Game Theory deals with strategic interactions among multiple decision makers, called players (and in some contexts, agents), with each player’s preference ordering among multiple alternatives captured in an objective function for that player, which she either tries to maximize (in which case the objective function is a utility function or a benefit function) or minimize (in which case we refer to the objective function as a cost function or a loss function). The zero-sum game-theoretic approach to robust control allows the unknowns to be treated as inputs controlled by an adversary who has an objective completely opposite of that of the controller This direct conflict of interest between the controller and a fictitious adversary leads to a zero-sum dynamic game formulation, whose minimax or saddle-point solution under a given information structure for the controller, which is shared by the adversary (who is the maximizing player), leads to a robust control law for the system. This approach has led to optimal H-infinity designs for linear as well as nonlinear systems under different information structures, and has been adopted by economists, such as the Nobel Laureates Lars Hansen and Thomas Sargent in their 2008 Princeton University Press book Robustness.
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