The IEEE Transactions on Control of Network Systems publishes high-quality papers on systems with interconnected components. The journal is primarily interested in problems related to the control of network systems but is also open to contributions concerning their design, study, engineering, optimization, and emerging behavior as these can inform and guide design and control. The Transactions invites rigorous methodological/theory papers on network systems and application papers that have a significant degree of modeling or methodological novelty in some application area of network systems. Application areas are many, spanning engineered systems, social science, economics, and biological systems. Examples of potential application domains include:
- Networked control systems, where the controlled system, actuators, and sensors are not necessarily co-located but connected over a communication network with its limited band-width, delays, and losses.
- Communication networks, which include both wireline and wireless networks and have to be modeled, controlled, optimized, priced, simulated, and secured. Particular control- related problems in this domain include: routing, flow control, admission control, dynamics of the spread of viruses and malware, and interactions among competing entities (network economics).
- Sensor networks, often wireless, that have all characteristics of communication networks but with the addition of sensors which interact with the physical world. Examples of control-related problems concern estimation, consensus, averaging, and decision making over net-works.
- Cyber-physical systems that encompass systems with both physical and cyber components. In many cases, networking is key to connect the various system components and a plethora of problems can be posed, from abstract architectural issues to very practical problems in actual systems. The optimal deployment, control, performance evaluation, and security of these systems are examples of problems that have been considered in this domain.
- Networks of autonomous agents include networks of robots and UAVs giving rise to problems such as swarming, consensus, cooperative control, motion planning, formation control, deployment, robustness, and bio-inspired control.
- Electric power networks which include the more traditional electric power networks but also new constructs such as micro-grids, fleets of plug-in hybrid vehicles interacting with the grid, and electricity demand response by cooperation among devices within a building or home.
- Transportation networks, which is an established area of research, but one where sensor networks, crowd-sourcing, smart parking, smart traffic lights, and vehicular communication networks are now emerging and promising significant improvements.
- Biological networks, including signal transduction networks, gene regulation networks, protein interaction networks, metabolic networks, phylogenetic networks, and ecological networks which model consumer-resource interactions between groups of organisms. Particular control-related problems have been formulated in metabolic networks, protein interaction networks, and in understanding collective behavior in animal groups.
- Social and Economic networks which model interactions among humans for social or economic reasons. Problems within the scope of the Transactions include decision making (e.g., distributed), behavior, phase transitions, resource allocation, and games over networks.
