The evolution of information and communication technologies has yielded the means of sharing measurements and other information in an efficient and flexible way, which has enabled the size and complexity of control applications to increase. At the same time, the improvements in the computational and communicational capabilities of control devices have fostered the development of noncentralized control architectures, already motivated by the inherent structural constraints of large-scale systems. Computer-based control approaches such as model predictive control (MPC) are visible beneficiaries of these advances and have registered a significant growth regarding both theoretical and applied fields. Coalitional control focuses on the local interests that motivate the controllers to assemble, an aspect so far rarely contemplated in the distributed control literature. This article presents the main concepts and challenges in coalitional control, and the links with cooperative network game theory.

Single column version, 35 pages