Life lessons from and for distributed MPC – Part 2: Choice of decision makers

This paper and an accompanying paper (McNamara et al., 2018) revisit the Distributed Predictive Control (DMPC) literature and seek to establish links with the social behaviour, focusing in particular on ways in which DMPC could be used to provide insights into the mechanisms of group regulation in social systems. It will be noted that there are major differences between the way in which DMPC algorithms and Social Human Participants (SHPs) form their respective decisions.

Whereas in a first paper (McNamara et al., 2018) we concentrated on the dynamics of the cooperation and the weightings in the agents’ decision, the present paper extends the discussion to the arrangements in the group of decision makers. This paper concludes with some caveats as regards further analyses of social system using the methods proposed in these two papers.