Distributed event-triggered consensus strategy for multi-agent systems under limited resources

Abstract

The paper proposes a distributed structure to address an event-triggered consensus problem for multi-agent systems which aims at concurrent reduction in inter-agent communication, control input actuation and energy consumption. Following the proposed approach, asymptotic convergence of all agents to consensus requires that each agent broadcasts its sampled-state to the neighbours and updates its control input only at its own triggering instants, unlike the existing related works. Obviously, it decreases the network bandwidth usage, sensor energy consumption, computation resources usage and actuator wears. As a result, it facilitates the implementation of the proposed consensus protocol in the real-world applications with limited resources. The stability of the closed-loop system under an event-based protocol is proved analytically. Some numerical results are presented which confirm the analytical discussion on the effectiveness of the proposed design.

Keywords:

• event-triggered control
• multi-agent systems
• consensus problem
• limited resources

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank the editor, associate editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.