Abstract
Recent advances in wired and wireless technology necessitate the development of theory, models and tools to cope with new challenges posed by large-scale networks and various problems arising in current and anticipated applications over such networks. In this talk, optimization problems and algorithms for distributed multi-agent networked systems will be discussed. The distributed nature of the problem is reflected in agents having their own local (private) information while they have a common goal to optimize the sum of their objectives through some limited information exchange. The inherent lack of a central coordinator is compensated through the use of network to communicate certain estimates and the use of appropriate local-aggregation schemes. The overall approach allows agents to achieve the desired optimization goal without sharing the explicit form of their locally known objective functions. However, the agents are willing to cooperate with each other locally to solve the problem by exchanging some estimates of relevant information. Distributed algorithms will be discussed for synchronous and asynchronous implementations together with their basic convergence properties.