Across the globe, the past several years have seen a tremendous increase in the role of cooperative autonomous systems. The field of cooperative control and optimization has established itself as a part of many different scientific disciplines. The contents of this hugely important volume, which adds much to the debate on the subject, are culled from papers presented at the Seventh Annual International Conference on Cooperative Control and Optimization, held in Gainesville, Florida, in January 2007.

- 25 chapters of creative approaches to modeling, analysis, and synthesis of cooperative systems
- Research results from top researchers in the field of cooperative systems
- Exciting insights to cooperative systems which have increasingly played a larger and more important role in many aspects of military sciences, biology, communications, robotics, and decision making

Cooperative systems are pervasive in a multitude of environments and at all levels. We find them at the microscopic biological level up to complex ecological structures. They are found in single organisms and they exist in large sociological organizations. Cooperative systems can be found in machine applications and in situations involving man and machine working together.

They have some common elements: 1) more than one entity, 2) the entities have behaviors that influence the decision space, 3) entities share at least one common objective, and 4) entities share information whether...