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.

翻译：信息与通信技术的演进提供了高效灵活共享测量数据及其他信息的手段，这使得控制应用的规模与复杂性得以提升。与此同时，控制设备计算与通信能力的进步推动了非集中式控制架构的发展——这一趋势本就受到大规模系统固有结构约束的驱动。基于计算机的控制方法（如模型预测控制（MPC））是这些进展的显著受益者，在理论与应用领域均取得了显著增长。联盟控制聚焦于驱动控制器组装的局部利益动机，这一维度在分布式控制文献中迄今鲜有探讨。本文阐述了联盟控制的核心概念与挑战，及其与合作网络博弈论的内在联系。