Nowadays, one of the most challenging problems in this field is how to handle the integration and interaction between different devices/infrastructures and their corresponding control systems, specially if the nature of the entities involved is diverse. This leads to the definition of the so-called cyber-physical systems (CPS), which are composed of elements such as computers, sensors, actuators, robots and even human beings that exchange information in order to govern physical processes.

The optimal solution for any control problem, including those of CPS, is obtained centrally, i.e., a single controller receives information from all elements of the system and calculates and transmits the actions to all actuators to obtain the best performance. However, these types of strategies are not applicable in CPSs fo reasons such as: (i) given the heterogeneous nature of system elements, the resulting control problem may be difficult to formulate and, moreover, impossible to solve in real time; ii) CPS can be composed of different autonomous entities with different objectives, which creates conflicts in the exchange of information. This requires addressing this problem through distributed strategies, which respect the autonomy and objectives of the elements of the system and are also scalable. In particular, the coalitional control strategies developed by the applicant group in the context of two recent European projects are particularly useful in this situation, as they are based on cooperative game theory and provide dynamic collaboration mechanisms between systems that preserve their individual interests.

The objective of this project is to apply model predictive control (MPC) to CPS. MPC uses a mathematical model to predict the evolution of a system. Hence, it allows predicting the interaction between systems to group the controllers in coalitions according to their couplings for the sake of performance. The ultimate goal of C3PO is to develop a coalitional control framework that allows optimizing the cooperation in cyber-physical systems (CPS) in robust and scalable manner. C3PO’s approach aims to integrate heterogeneous entities are into a control problem beyond the state-of-the-art with direct applications in large-scale systems. In particular, two case studies from previos European projects are considered: electric vehicle management (with Ayesa) and irrication canals (with Mobile Water Management).