We present a detailed study on the design of decentralized receding horizon control (RHC) schemes for decoupled systems. We formulate an optimal control problem for a set of dynamically decoupled systems where the cost function and constraints couple the dynamical behavior of the systems. The coupling is described through a graph where each system is a node, and cost and constraints of the optimization problem associated with each node are only function of its state and the states of its neighbors. The complexity of the problem is addressed by breaking a centralized RHC controller into distinct RHC controllers of smaller sizes. Each RHC controller is associated with a different node and computes the local control inputs based only on the states of the node and of its neighbors. We analyze the properties of the proposed scheme and introduce sufficient stability conditions based on prediction errors. Finally, we focus on linear systems and show how to recast the stability conditions into a set of matrix semi-definiteness tests. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.