Distributed event-triggered coordination for average consensus on weight-balanced digraphs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a new distributed event-triggered algorithm for average consensus in weight-balanced digraphs, ensuring exponential convergence without continuous neighbor information and avoiding Zeno behavior.

Contribution

It presents a novel event-triggered control strategy that does not require continuous neighbor state access or global parameters, with proven convergence and Zeno-free guarantees.

Findings

Ensures exponential convergence to average consensus.

Prevents Zeno behavior in event-triggered updates.

Works under switching topologies with weaker connectivity conditions.

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel distributed event-triggered algorithmic solution to the multi-agent average consensus problem for networks whose communication topology is described by weight-balanced, strongly connected digraphs. The proposed event-triggered communication and control strategy does not rely on individual agents having continuous or periodic access to information about the state of their neighbors. In addition, it does not require the agents to have a priori knowledge of any global parameter. We show that, under the proposed law, events cannot be triggered an infinite number of times in any finite period (i.e., no Zeno behavior), and that the resulting network executions provably converge to the average of the initial agents' states exponentially fast. We also provide weaker conditions on connectivity under which convergence is guaranteed when the communication topology is switching. Simulations illustrate our results.