  We study the evolution of locally optimal decentralized controllers with the
damping of the control system. Empirically it is shown that even for instances
with an exponential number of connected components, damping merges all local
solutions to the one global solution. We characterize the evolution of locally
optimal solutions with the notion of hemi-continuity and further derive
asymptotic properties of the objective function and of the locally optimal
controllers as the damping becomes large. Especially, we prove that with enough
damping, there is no spurious locally optimal controller with favorable control
structures. The convoluted behavior of the locally optimal trajectory is
illustrated with numerical examples.
