Title: Team Theory for Distributed Decision Making over Networks

Speaker: GATTAMI, Ather (Senior Researcher, Ericsson Research, Sweden)

Abstract:

Distributed decision making is one of the most fundamental problems in science and engineering today. Today’s technology relies on systems distributed over networks with local information, performing different tasks under some performance constraints. Examples include wired and wireless communication networks, control of power grids, and intelligent transportation systems. In this talk, we will give a brief overview of static team decision theory in both stochastic and deterministic setting.

We move on to explore extension to constrained team decision problems and problems where possible signaling between team members is possible, leading to notoriously hard problems such as the Witsenhausen counterexample. We show how techniques from communication theory can be used to obtain the best optimization result known thus far for the Witsenhausen counterexample. We also give simple, yet powerful, tools to attack problems of similar nature in the deterministic setting. Finally, we show how the theory is applied successfully to a practical vehicle platooning project done together with the Swedish truck company Scania.