During the past decade, plenty of studies have been carried out in the literature to address the coordination and cooperation problems in complex adaptive systems, and have continued to grow. This Research Topic eBook publishes 14 papers by 39 authors, and most of these published papers present current research illustrating the depth and breadth of ongoing work on the coordination and cooperation problems in complex adaptive systems. It thus provides a timely discussion for researchers on the hotspots and challenges of the study on coordination and cooperation in theoretical models and applied systems.

This volume contains the contributions to a Workshop on Group Coordination and Cooperative Control held in Tromsø, Norway, 2006, to focus on control theoretic challenges raised by group coordination and cooperation, and lay a foundation for future research. The book covers a wide range of subjects within the area of group coordination and cooperative control, and forms a valuable and up-to-date text on the newer trends in group coordination and cooperative control.

There are two ways people coordinate their actions: through cooperation, exercised by economic power, and through control, exercised by political power. When economic and political power are held by the same people, the result is stagnation; when those who hold economic power are not the same people who hold political power, the result is progress. This book presents the ways in which economic power and political power can be separated, and how they can remain so, by analyzing the nature of power and the differences between economic and political power. The book then discusses the history of economic and political power, including hunter-gatherer societies, agrarian societies, and modern commercial and industrial societies. This background lends insight into why political and economic power were typically held by the same people, and why recently those without political power have been able to acquire economic power. Incentives play a key role in understanding how those two types of power can become separated, and why there is always a tendency for them to recombine. But ideas also play a crucial role, including the influence of the Enlightenment, on the progress that has occurred in the last several hundred years.

Understanding the importance of the strategic planning to our communities is very essential, where this process helps to ensure and identify clear goals. Strategic planning helps to assess the available and expected capabilities inside and outside the organization, in order to the formulation and implementation of the plans.