Coalitional games for networked controllers with constraints on semivalues: A randomized design approach

Abstract

In a networked control architecture, the semivalues of a coalitional game where the communication links are the players can be used to provide information regarding their relevance. The linear relationship between the characteristic function of the game and the semivalues can be exploited to impose constraints on the design of the corresponding networked controllers to promote or penalize the use of certain links considering their impact on the overall system performance. In previous works, this approach was restricted to small networks due to the combinatorial growth of the problem size with the number of links. This work proposes a method to mitigate this issue by performing a random sampling in the set of topologies, i.e., coalitions of links, and employing a mild bound to reflect the impact of nonsampled topologies in the calculations. The simulation results show that the proposed approach can lead to significant reductions in computation time with moderate loss of performance.