Distributed control means by definition that there is a central coordinator that distributes its control actions across the system.
That would be a central controller or master controller pattern.
Distributed control by definition means that "control" is distributed. This means you have valves, switches, process controllers which are "active". When a temperature sensor sees a value is low, it directly asks the heater for heat. It does not go back to mummy for permission that will have been prior arranged in the systems modelling and setup.
Consider home heating control systems these days. In many cases the radiator sensor/valve is the entity which directly asks the boiler to fire if it needs it. Personally I do not implement mine like this. I use controller / controlled pattern, although it's decoupled as "best effort", serve and forget.
The thing about any distributed system it's difficult to synchronise things. For some IT specific reasons, electrical/optical reasons and just plain old speed of light reasons, causality and stuff. As a pretty rudimentary example, consider that while you can know the "round trip" delay between 2 nodes, it's is very close to impossible to know the one way trip. Not when you are in the micro-second latency across continents. To gain proper sync between nodes you need to use NTP which is a distributed time synchronisation protocol. However it still won't get you past relativity.
The hardest part is keeping everything "inter-operatable" - may happen concurrently, distributed and not conflict. Where that is not possibly and distributed entities may begin conflicting or competing operations that these are dealt with in a sensible fashion, aborting, rolling back, prioritisation, but first you have to detect conflicts and deadlocks. The more complex the system, the more nodes and the more line crosses in the diagrams and the more difficult it is to get right and usually the bigger mess when it goes wrong.
For the leading edge of "distrbuted control systems", you want to look into the world of "Fleet" smart cars. At the leading edge of that they are hoping to begin controlling cars, or rather having cars control themselves based on information shared with other cars around or ahead. If you allow this to remain enabled then your highway cruise control can adapt to keep you "in the flow" and not bunched up with clumps of traffic waves and slowing you down etc. If an accident is reported 5 miles up the road it can notify you via the nav that a divert is prudant. etc. etc.