Scalability in nonlinear network systems affected by delays and disturbances

TL;DR

This paper investigates the scalability of nonlinear heterogeneous networks impacted by delays and disturbances, providing conditions and guidelines to ensure scalable performance in dynamic and complex network configurations.

Contribution

It introduces formal conditions for assessing and guaranteeing scalability in nonlinear networks with delays and disturbances, applicable to various network types and changing configurations.

Findings

Provided two sufficient conditions for scalability.

Demonstrated the conditions' effectiveness through numerical examples.

Applicable to leader-follower and leaderless networks.

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the study of scalability in nonlinear heterogeneous networks affected by communication delays and disturbances. After formalizing the notion of scalability, we give two sufficient conditions to assess this property. Our results can be used to study leader-follower and leaderless networks and also allow to consider the case when the desired configuration of the system changes over time. We show how our conditions can be turned into design guidelines to guarantee scalability and illustrate their effectiveness via numerical examples.