Meirong Zhang

Adopting a pioneering ‘post-eclectic’ paradigm, this book systematically demonstrates that private international law must incorporate ‘global common values’ into its normative foundation. Moving beyond abstract theory, the author provides a practical roadmap for addressing ‘vertical’ normative conflicts in four critical domains: the digital economy, decentralised finance, transboundary ecological supply chains, and cross-border bioethics. Drawing upon recent ground-breaking judicial decisions worldwide and the latest developments in Chinese private international law, the book explores how domestic courts can leverage jurisdiction, choice of law, and judgment enforcement to protect these global common values. It is an essential resource for legal scholars, practitioners, and policymakers seeking institutional solutions to secure a sustainable and just globalised world.

This monograph explores the synchronization of large-scale, multi-agent dynamical systems in the presence of disturbances, delays, and time-varying networks. Drawing upon their extensive work in this area, the authors provide a thorough treatment of agents with higher-order dynamics, different classes of models for agents, and the underlying networks representing the agents’ actions. The high technical level of their presentation and their rigorous mathematical approach make this a timely and valuable resource that will fill a gap in the existing literature. Divided into two sections, the first part of the book focuses on state synchronization of homogeneous multi-agent systems. The authors consider state synchronization by determining control strategies for both continuous- and discrete-time systems that achieve state synchronization under both full- and partial-state coupling. The chapters that follow examine multi-agent systems with both linear and nonlinear time-varying agents, input-delays for continuous- and discrete-time systems, and communication delays for continuous-time systems. The second part of the book is dedicated to regulated output synchronization of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with linear and nonlinear agents. Both sections of the book include performance considerations in H2- and H-infinity norms in the presence of external disturbances. Research on synchronization of multi-agent systems has been growing in popularity and is highly interdisciplinary, with applications to automobile systems, aerospace systems, multiple-satellite GPS and high-resolution satellite imagery, aircraft formations, highway traffic platooning, industrial process control with multiple processes, and more. Synchronization of Multi-Agent Systems in the Presence of Disturbances and Delays will therefore be of interest to upper-level graduate students, researchers, and engineers in industry working on interconnected dynamical systems.

This monograph explores the synchronization of large-scale, multi-agent dynamical systems in the presence of disturbances, delays, and time-varying networks. Drawing upon their extensive work in this area, the authors provide a thorough treatment of agents with higher-order dynamics, different classes of models for agents, and the underlying networks representing the agents’ actions. The high technical level of their presentation and their rigorous mathematical approach make this a timely and valuable resource that will fill a gap in the existing literature. Divided into two sections, the first part of the book focuses on state synchronization of homogeneous multi-agent systems. The authors consider state synchronization by determining control strategies for both continuous- and discrete-time systems that achieve state synchronization under both full- and partial-state coupling. The chapters that follow examine multi-agent systems with both linear and nonlinear time-varying agents, input-delays for continuous- and discrete-time systems, and communication delays for continuous-time systems. The second part of the book is dedicated to regulated output synchronization of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with linear and nonlinear agents. Both sections of the book include performance considerations in H2- and H-infinity norms in the presence of external disturbances. Research on synchronization of multi-agent systems has been growing in popularity and is highly interdisciplinary, with applications to automobile systems, aerospace systems, multiple-satellite GPS and high-resolution satellite imagery, aircraft formations, highway traffic platooning, industrial process control with multiple processes, and more. Synchronization of Multi-Agent Systems in the Presence of Disturbances and Delays will therefore be of interest to upper-level graduate students, researchers, and engineers in industry working on interconnected dynamical systems.