Transmission-Constrained Consensus of Multiagent Networks

TL;DR

This paper investigates how multiagent systems can achieve consensus despite transmission constraints and disturbances, establishing conditions for convergence and stability using algebraic topology and stability theory.

Contribution

It introduces a universal model for transmission-constrained consensus, providing necessary and sufficient conditions for convergence and analyzing equilibrium stability.

Findings

Agents can reach consensus under certain transmission constraints.

The equilibrium state depends only on network structure and constraints.

The system's equilibrium is asymptotically stable.

Abstract

This paper studies the consensus problem for multiagent systems with transmission constraints. A novel model of multiagent systems is proposed where the information transmissions between agents are disturbed by irregular distortions or interferences (named transmission constraint functions), and this model is universal which can be applied in many cases, such as interval consensus and discarded consensus. In the transmission-constrained consensus problem, we obtain the necessary and sufficient condition that agents can converge to state consensus. Furthermore, a more general case is studied in which the system reaches an equilibrium. Based on some techniques of algebraic topology and stability theory, the existence, uniqueness and stability of the system equilibrium point can be proven, which means the system can reach an asymptotically stable equilibrium. Moreover, the state values of the equilibrium are only decided by the network structure and transmission constraint functions, but not the agents' initial states. Finally, numerical simulations are presented to illustrate the proposed theorems and corollaries.