Event-Triggered Communication and Control of Networked Systems for Multi-Agent Consensus

TL;DR

This paper reviews event-triggered strategies for multi-agent consensus, discussing motivations, methods, challenges, and applications in distributed control, emphasizing assumptions on network capabilities and the broader relevance to cooperative algorithms.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of event-triggered consensus algorithms, highlighting technical challenges, assumptions, and their applicability to various networked control tasks.

Findings

Event-triggered strategies reduce communication in multi-agent systems.

Technical challenges include ensuring stability and robustness.

Applications extend to various distributed control scenarios.

Abstract

This article provides an introduction to event-triggered coordination for multi-agent average consensus. We provide a comprehensive account of the motivations behind the use of event-triggered strategies for consensus, the methods for algorithm synthesis, the technical challenges involved in establishing desirable properties of the resulting implementations, and their applications in distributed control. We pay special attention to the assumptions on the capabilities of the network agents and the resulting features of the algorithm execution, including the interconnection topology, the evaluation of triggers, and the role of imperfect information. The issues raised in our discussion transcend the specific consensus problem and are indeed characteristic of cooperative algorithms for networked systems that solve other coordination tasks. As our discussion progresses, we make these connections clear, highlighting general challenges and tools to address them widespread in the event-triggered control of networked systems.