Cooperative, collaborating autonomous systems are at the forefront of research efforts in numerous disciplines across the applied sciences. There is constant progress in solution techniques for these systems. However, despite this progress, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve. Theoretical results are very difficult to come by. Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new, cutting-edge, ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, information flow, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 30 – February 1, 2008.

Cooperative, collaborating autonomous systems are at the forefront of research efforts in numerous disciplines across the applied sciences. There is constant progress in solution techniques for these systems. However, despite this progress, cooperating systems have continued to be extremely difficult to model, analyze, and solve. Theoretical results are very difficult to come by. Each year, the International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization (CCO) brings together top researchers from around the world to present new, cutting-edge, ideas, theories, applications, and advances in the fields of autonomous agents, cooperative systems, control theory, information flow, and optimization. The works in this volume are a result of invited papers and selected presentations at the Eighth Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, January 30 – February 1, 2008.

A cooperative system is defined to be multiple dynamic entities that share information or tasks to accomplish a common, though perhaps not singular, objective. Examples of cooperative control systems might include: robots operating within a manufacturing cell, unmanned aircraft in search and rescue operations or military surveillance and attack missions, arrays of micro satellites that form a distributed large aperture radar, employees operating within an organization, and software agents. The term entity is most often associated with vehicles capable of physical motion such as robots, automobiles, ships, and aircraft, but the definition extends to any entity concept that exhibits a time dependent behavior. Critical to cooperation is communication, which may be accomplished through active message passing or by passive observation. It is assumed that cooperation is being used to accomplish some common purpose that is greater than the purpose of each individual, but we recognize that the individual may have other objectives as well, perhaps due to being a member of other caucuses. This implies that cooperation may assume hierarchical forms as well. The decision-making processes (control) are typically thought to be distributed or decentralized to some degree. For if not, a cooperative system could always be modeled as a single entity. The level of cooperation may be indicated by the amount of information exchanged between entities. Cooperative systems may involve task sharing and can consist of heterogeneous entities. Mixed initiative systems are particularly interesting heterogeneous systems since they are composed of humans and machines. Finally, one is often interested in how cooperative systems perform under noisy or adversary conditions. In December 2000, the Air Force Research Laboratory and the University of Florida successfully hosted the first Workshop on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. This book contains selected refereed papers summarizing the participants' research in control and optimization of cooperative systems. Audience: Faculty, graduate students, and researchers in optimization and control, computer sciences and engineering.

Across the globe, the past several years have seen a tremendous increase in the role of cooperative autonomous systems. The field of cooperative control and optimization has established itself as a part of many different scientific disciplines. The contents of this hugely important volume, which adds much to the debate on the subject, are culled from papers presented at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, in January 2007.

Over the past several years, cooperative control and optimization has un questionably been established as one of the most important areas of research in the military sciences. Even so, cooperative control and optimization tran scends the military in its scope -having become quite relevant to a broad class of systems with many exciting, commercial, applications. One reason for all the excitement is that research has been so incredibly diverse -spanning many scientific and engineering disciplines. This latest volume in the Cooperative Systems book series clearly illustrates this trend towards diversity and creative thought. And no wonder, cooperative systems are among the hardest systems control science has endeavored to study, hence creative approaches to model ing, analysis, and synthesis are a must! The definition of cooperation itself is a slippery issue. As you will see in this and previous volumes, cooperation has been cast into many different roles and therefore has assumed many diverse meanings. Perhaps the most we can say which unites these disparate concepts is that cooperation (1) requires more than one entity, (2) the entities must have some dynamic behavior that influences the decision space, (3) the entities share at least one common objective, and (4) entities are able to share information about themselves and their environment. Optimization and control have long been active fields of research in engi neering.

During the last decades, considerable progress has been observed in all aspects regarding the study of cooperative systems including modeling of cooperative systems, resource allocation, discrete event driven dynamical control, continuous and hybrid dynamical control, and theory of the interaction of information, control, and hierarchy. Solution methods have been proposed using control and optimization approaches, emergent rule based techniques, game theoretic and team theoretic approaches. Measures of performance have been suggested that include the effects of hierarchies and information structures on solutions, performance bounds, concepts of convergence and stability, and problem complexity. These and other topics were discusses at the Second Annual Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization in Gainesville, Florida. Refereed papers written by selected conference participants from the conference are gathered in this volume, which presents problem models, theoretical results, and algorithms for various aspects of cooperative control. Audience: The book is addressed to faculty, graduate students, and researchers in optimization and control, computer sciences and engineering.