Today, the world witnesses a growing demand for the connectivity between systems. The connectivity can span vast distances and information can be transferred between the systems in a relatively insignificant time. This is evident in different applications, such as process facilities, remote medical operations, traffic networks, as well as power generation, transmission, and distribution. Thus, there is a need for the advancement of approaches for the control of connected disperse systems.

In a typical control system topology, a plant system is regulated using a controller system. In this thesis, an alternative control system topology is proposed and its associated design is presented. In the proposed topology, a plant system can be connected to a controller system and/or a set of distributed and inter-connected nodes that form a network system. The set of distributed and inter-connected nodes are capable of routing information between all the nodes of the topology, in addition to performing computational tasks. Thus, the plant system is regulated using the controller and network systems, in an individual or a cooperative manner. This introduces both centralized and decentralized control paradigms in the proposed control system topology.

In this thesis, the proposed topology and its associated design are addressed from different perspectives, while delivering modelling frameworks, condition requirements, and design procedures as well as under ideal operii ating scenarios, failures and cyber attacks, induced connectivity constraints, and additional specifications in terms of model reduction and segregation of the nodes of the network system into two disjoint sets of nodes with different objectives.