One of the challenges in control community nowadays is to model and control large-scale systems with increasing size and complexity. The large-scale systems arise from, for instance, robotic systems, electric power grids, transportation networks, and industrial process systems. In recent years, distributed control has emerged as an attractive control methodology to handle the scale and interactions of large-scale complex systems thanks to the recent advances of the communication technology, which makes the communication between the subsystems possible. However, insertion of communication networks into the control systems comes at the price of nonideal signal transmission: the data sent through the networks experience time delay or suffer transmission data losses. Though some interesting results have been reported in this area, it is recognized that there are still many challenging issues that need to be investigated and discussed.

The overall aim of this special issue is to provide an up-to-date overview of the research directions and advanced methodologies in the distributed control of large-scale systems. Of particular interest the papers in this special issue are devoted to the development of distributed state estimation, fault diagnosis and control of the large-scale systems, and the applications of the distributed control methodologies to the large-scale smart grids, transportation networks, and industrial process systems, etc.

Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

• Distributed filtering and estimation of the large-scale systems
• Distributed fault detection and diagnosis of the large-scale systems
• Distributed coordinated control of the large-scale systems
• Applications of distributed control algorithms to practical plants such as large-scale smart grids, transportation networks, and industrial process systems