Decentralized design of consensus protocols with minimal communication links based on directed spanning tree

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fully decentralized method for designing consensus protocols in multi-agent systems using directed spanning trees, minimizing communication links while ensuring stability and consensus.

Contribution

It presents a novel DST-based linear transformation approach that reduces communication links and guarantees consensus through decentralized output stabilization.

Findings

Consensus is achieved with minimal communication links.

The method guarantees stability via decentralized fixed mode criteria.

Numerical examples verify the effectiveness of the approach.

Abstract

This paper proposes a decentralized design approach of consensus protocols of multi-agent systems via a directed-spanning-tree(DST)-based linear transformation and the corresponding minimal communication links. First, the consensus problem of multi-agent systems is transformed into the decentralized output stabilization problem by constructing a linear transformation based on a DST of the communication topology, and thus a necessary and sufficient consensus criterion in terms of decentralized fixed mode is derived. Next, a new distributed protocol is designed by using only the neighbors information on the DST, which is a fully decentralized design approach. Finally, some numerical examples are given to verify the results attained.