Fake information mechanism based privacy-preserving average consensus

ABSTRACT

In order to reach an agreement, each agent in distributed systems needs to exchange its state information with neighbours. In this case, however, it is difficult to guarantee sensitive information will not be leaked. To tackle the problem, this paper proposes an encryption method, which does not need to compromise accuracy to privacy, nor does it need to encrypt and decrypt state information every time. Meanwhile, the method in this paper not only keeps the initial state secret, but also considers the real-time state privacy. Then, we further elaborate two aspects of the proposed method by simple proofs. Finally, simulations are presented to verify the effectiveness of our algorithm.

KEYWORDS:

• Privacy-preservation
• average consensus
• multi-agent systems
• fake information mechanism

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editors and anonymous reviewers for helping to improve the quality of this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analysed in this study.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Yakun Zhu

Yakun Zhu received the Ph.D. degree from the Department of Electrical Engineering, Yanshan University, China, in 2014. He is currently with the School of Control Engineering, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao. His research interests include cooperative control of multiagent systems.

Jing Lu

Jing Lu received the B.S. degree from the Department of Electrical Information, Dalian Jiaotong University, in 2018. She is currently pursuing the M.S. degree with the Department of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao. Her main research interests include the control of multi-agent systems and privacy-preserving.

Xiaoyu Du

Xiaoyu Du received the B.S. degree from the Department of Mechanical and Electrical Engineering, Hainan University, in 2021. He is currently pursuing the M.S. degree with the Department of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University at Qinhuangdao. His main research interests include the control of multi-agent systems and optimal control.

Ge Guo

Ge Guo received the B.S. and Ph.D. degrees from Northeastern University in 1994 and 1998, respectively. In 1999, he joined the Lanzhou University of Technology, where he was the Director of the Institute of Intelligent Control and Robots and a Professor from 2004 to 2005. He is currently a Professor with Northeastern University. He has published over 100 journal papers within his areas of research interest, which include intelligent transportation systems and cyber-physical systems. Dr. Guo is the Managing Editor of the International Journal of Systems, Control and Communications and an Associate Editor of several other journals like the IEEE Transactions on Intelligent Transportation Systems, the Information Sciences, the Acta Automatica Sinica and the IEEE Intelligent Transportation Systems Magazine. He was an honouree of the New Century Excellent Talents in University, Ministry of Education, China, in 2004, and a nominee for Gansu Top Ten Excellent Youths by the Gansu Provincial Government in 2005. He was the CAA Young Scientist Award Winner in 2017.