Game Theory and Distributed Control

Game theory has been employed traditionally as a modeling tool for describing and influencing behavior in societal systems. Recently, game theory has emerged as a valuable tool for controlling or prescribing behavior in distributed engineered systems. The rationale for this new perspective stems from the parallels between the underlying decision-making architectures in both societal systems and distributed engineered systems. In particular, both settings involve an interconnection of decision-making elements whose collective behavior depends on a compilation of local decisions that are based on partial information about each other and the state of the world. Accordingly, there is extensive work in game theory that is relevant to the engineering agenda. Similarities notwithstanding, there remain important differences between the constraints and objectives in societal and engineered systems that require looking at game-theoretic methods from a new perspective. This chapter provides an overview of selected recent developments of game-theoretic methods in this role as a framework for distributed control in engineered systems.