Known unknowns, unknown unknowns and information flow: new concepts in decentralized control

We introduce and analyze a model for decentral- ized control. The model is broad enough to include problems such as formation control, decentralization of the power grid and flocking. The objective of this paper is twofold. First, we show how the issue of decentralization goes beyond having agents know only part of the state of the system. In fact, we argue that a complete theory of decentralization should take into account the fact that agents can be made aware of only part of the global objective of the ensemble. A second contribution of this paper is the introduction of a rigorous definition of information flow for a decentralized system: we show how to attach to a general nonlinear decentralized system a unique information flow graph that is an invariant of the system. In order to address some finer issues in decentralized system, such as the existence of so-called “information loops”, we further refine the information flow graph to a simplicial complex-more precisely, a Whitney complex. We illustrate the main results on a variety of examples.

💡 Research Summary

The paper presents a comprehensive framework for decentralized control that goes beyond the traditional assumption that agents merely have partial knowledge of the system state. It introduces two distinct layers of informational limitation: (1) partial observation of the state, captured by smooth observation maps (h_i: M\to\mathbb{R}^{k_i}); and (2) partial knowledge of the global objective, modeled by a parameterized objective function (F(\mu;x,u)) and agent‑specific mappings (\delta_i: P\to P_i). When (\delta_i) is non‑invertible, an agent possesses only a “known unknown” about the overall goal, a notion the authors argue is essential for realistic large‑scale systems such as power grids, autonomous vehicle fleets, and biological swarms.

Mathematically, the authors consider a smooth manifold (M) for the overall state and a family of nonlinear control systems \