No Arabic abstract
Models of consensus are used to manage multiple agent systems in order to choose between different recommendations provided by the system. It is assumed that there is a central agent that solicits recommendations or plans from other agents. That agent the n determines the consensus of the other agents, and chooses the resultant consensus recommendation or plan. Voting schemes such as this have been used in a variety of domains, including air traffic control. This paper uses an analytic model to study the use of consensus in multiple agent systems. The binomial model is used to study the probability that the consensus judgment is correct or incorrect. That basic model is extended to account for both different levels of agent competence and unequal prior odds. The analysis of that model is critical in the investigation of multiple agent systems, since the model leads us to conclude that in some cases consensus judgment is not appropriate. In addition, the results allow us to determine how many agents should be used to develop consensus decisions, which agents should be used to develop consensus decisions and under which conditions the consensus model should be used.
The current paper deals with limited-budget output consensus for descriptor multiagent systems with two types of switching communication topologies; that is, switching connected ones and jointly connected ones. Firstly, a singular dynamic output feedback control protocol with switching communication topologies is proposed on the basis of the observable decomposition, where an energy constraint is involved and protocol states of neighboring agents are utilized to derive a new two-step design approach of gain matrices. Then, limited-budget output consensus problems are transformed into asymptotic stability ones and a valid candidate of the output consensus function is determined. Furthermore, sufficient conditions for limited-budget output consensus design for two types of switching communication topologies are proposed, respectively. Finally, two numerical simulations are shown to demonstrate theoretical conclusions.
This paper investigates an optimal consensus problem for a group of uncertain linear multi-agent systems. All agents are allowed to possess parametric uncertainties that range over an arbitrarily large compact set. The goal is to collectively minimize a sum of local costs in a distributed fashion and finally achieve an output consensus on this optimal point using only output information of agents. By adding an optimal signal generator to generate the global optimal point, we convert this problem to several decentralized robust tracking problems. Output feedback integral control is constructively given to achieve an optimal consensus under a mild graph connectivity condition. The efficacy of this control is verified by a numerical example.
This paper investigates the problem of distributed stochastic approximation in multi-agent systems. The algorithm under study consists of two steps: a local stochastic approximation step and a diffusion step which drives the network to a consensus. The diffusion step uses row-stochastic matrices to weight the network exchanges. As opposed to previous works, exchange matrices are not supposed to be doubly stochastic, and may also depend on the past estimate. We prove that non-doubly stochastic matrices generally influence the limit points of the algorithm. Nevertheless, the limit points are not affected by the choice of the matrices provided that the latter are doubly-stochastic in expectation. This conclusion legitimates the use of broadcast-like diffusion protocols, which are easier to implement. Next, by means of a central limit theorem, we prove that doubly stochastic protocols perform asymptotically as well as centralized algorithms and we quantify the degradation caused by the use of non doubly stochastic matrices. Throughout the paper, a special emphasis is put on the special case of distributed non-convex optimization as an illustration of our results.
In this paper we propose a novel method to establish stability and, in addition, convergence to a consensus state for a class of discrete-time Multi-Agent System (MAS) evolving according to nonlinear heterogeneous local interaction rules which is not based on Lyapunov function arguments. In particular, we focus on a class of discrete-time MASs whose global dynamics can be represented by sub-homogeneous and order-preserving nonlinear maps. This paper directly generalizes results for sub-homogeneous and order-preserving linear maps which are shown to be the counterpart to stochastic matrices thanks to nonlinear Perron-Frobenius theory. We provide sufficient conditions on the structure of local interaction rules among agents to establish convergence to a fixed point and study the consensus problem in this generalized framework as a particular case. Examples to show the effectiveness of the method are provided to corroborate the theoretical analysis.
In this paper, a distributed learning leader-follower consensus protocol based on Gaussian process regression for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems with unknown dynamics is designed. We propose a distributed learning approach to predict the residual dynamics for each agent. The stability of the consensus protocol using the data-driven model of the dynamics is shown via Lyapunov analysis. The followers ultimately synchronize to the leader with guaranteed error bounds by applying the proposed control law with a high probability. The effectiveness and the applicability of the developed protocol are demonstrated by simulation examples.