Distributed Source Identification by Two-Hop Consensus Dynamics with Uniform Time-Varying Communication Time-Delays

Abstract

: This paper considers the average consensus problem by the 2-hop communication with time-varying timedelays. Each agent updates its state by a discrete-time consensus dynamics with fixed and undirected communication networks to achieve the average consensus. We also consider an application of the proposed consensus dynamics to an inverse problem of diffusion phenomena in order to find a source of a diffusion process from time-series data measured by agents. The inverse problem of diffusion phenomena can be formulated as a linear least squares problem by the difference approximation. We show that agents can estimate the initial distribution of concentration by solving the least squares problem with the proposed consensus dynamics.