Consensus Control for Linear Systems with Optimal Energy Cost

TL;DR

This paper develops an optimal energy cost controller for linear systems achieving consensus, optimizing control gain and graph weights, including negative edges, to minimize energy use while ensuring system stability.

Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to optimize energy cost in consensus control by jointly tuning control gains and graph weights, including negative edges, using SDP and Riccati equations.

Findings

Energy cost is bounded and minimized at a complete graph with equal weights.

Negative edge weights can improve system performance.

Optimal energy cost is achieved with a complete, equally weighted graph.

Abstract

In this paper, we design an optimal energy cost controller for linear systems asymptotic consensus given the topology of the graph. The controller depends only on relative information of the agents. Since finding the control gain for such controller is hard, we focus on finding an optimal controller among a classical family of controllers which is based on Algebraic Riccati Equation (ARE) and guarantees asymptotic consensus. Through analysis, we find that the energy cost is bounded by an interval and hence we minimize the upper bound. In order to do that, there are two classes of variables that need to be optimized: the control gain and the edge weights of the graph and are hence designed from two perspectives. A suboptimal control gain is obtained by choosing $Q=0$ in the ARE. Negative edge weights are allowed, and the problem is formulated as a Semi-definite Programming (SDP) problem. Having negative edge weights means that "competitions" between the agents are allowed. The motivation behind this setting is to have a better system performance. We provide a different proof from the angle of optimization and show that the lowest control energy cost is reached when the graph is complete and with equal edge weights. Furthermore, two sufficient conditions for the existence of negative optimal edge weights realization are given.