Consensus seeking and controlling over directed delayed networks

Abstract

In this paper, we are concerned about the consensus problem for multi-agent systems in the presence of directed information flow and arbitrary communication delays. For each agent, only delayed local information can be used to adjust its value. Information flow between connected agents can be asymmetric. It will be shown that, whatever the communication delays are in principle, consensus will eventually be achieved for strongly connected networks. Furthermore, a local controller is designed for one of the agents (but not for each agent) to control all the agents. Very weak feedback strength is proved to be effective for the control of multi-agent systems. Numerical simulations are also performed to verify our theoretical analysis. © 2009 ICST Institute for Computer Sciences, Social Informatics and Telecommunications Engineering.