Towards agile control of ship auxiliary systems

An agile control system is a set of distributed controllers designed for the management of complex, interconnected systems that are able to change their structure in response to faults and damage events. Structural changes include dynamic reconfiguration of communication, agent scoping, and control algorithms.We propose that information theory will be a valuable tool in the design and analysis of such a controller, in that the information-theoretic characteristics of the system affect the utility of the information gathered and processed in the course of generating a control strategy. In particular, the rate at which the information content of a prior observation becomes irrelevant to the current state of the system is studied, called entropic drag. This paper summarizes recent work by researchers at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab into components of an agile controller for ship auxiliary systems.