Major advancements over the last decades in wired and wireless communication networks gave rise to the new paradigm of Networked Control Systems (NCS). Within this paradigm, sensing and actuation signals are exchanged among various parts of a single system or among many subsystems via communication networks; the latter scenario is seen in Fig. 1.


Fig. 1: A general Networked Control System

Although this enables one to perform more complex tasks than traditional control paradigms, it comes at the cost of complicating the design phase and the required analysis tools. For example, the communication networks may introduce time-varying time delays, imperfect information exchange, information loss, etc. This affects the performance of any control laws that were designed without taking the network effects into account. Therefore, it becomes of paramount importance to address some of the following theoretical problems:

• Characterizing stability conditions for NCS.
• Minimizing the amount of information exchange within the overall system.
• Robustifying the system with respect to the network effects at the design phase.

The main aim of this group is to look at the theoretical issues mentioned above and adapt some of these concepts to two relevant applications:

• Area surveillance using multiple cameras
• Cyber attacks in power networks