Event-Triggered Control for Multi-Agent Systems: Event Mechanisms for Information Transmission and Controller Update

Abstract

This paper investigates the state consensus of linear multi-agent systems in a graph where each agent is equipped with two novel event-triggering mechanisms. Each agent utilizes them to avoid continuous information transmissions with its neighbors and to reduce the frequencies of controller updates, respectively. One of the event-triggering mechanisms defines a threshold of state errors by a constant plus a state-dependent variable. The other event-triggering mechanism introduces a period of rest time after each event. For each agent, both event-triggering mechanisms are fully distributed and are independent of any global information. The authors utilize a co-design approach to deal with the interplay between control gains and parameters in event-triggering mechanisms. With appropriate control gains in control laws and parameters in event-triggering conditions, subsystems employing discrete-time signals from neighbors and discrete-time signals from their controllers achieve the state consensus. Simulations are performed to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed event-triggering mechanisms.

Distributed Adaptive Mittag–Leffler Formation Control for Second-Order Fractional Multi-Agent Systems via Event-Triggered Control Strategy

“…Under this control mechanism, information communication proceeds after a predetermined event occurred, which can guarantee the expected performance and reduce communication costs. Based on the above advantages, ETCS have been widely used in the study of MASs in [27][28][29][30][31]. In [28], the authors applied stability theory of FMASs and developed a differential inequality convex function to address the consensus problem for discontinuous singularly perturbed MASs based on ETCS.…”

“…In [28], the authors applied stability theory of FMASs and developed a differential inequality convex function to address the consensus problem for discontinuous singularly perturbed MASs based on ETCS. In [29], under interplay between control gains and parameters, by employing the discrete-time signals from neighbors and co-design approach, two novel ETCS were presented to investigate the consensus issue of general MASs with linear growth. In [31], under the periodic DoS attacks, the problem of MASs formation was discussed via novel attack-resilient ETCS, and the generalized Nyquist stability criterion was used to analyze the error systems.…”

“…It should be pointed out that, in literature [28,29,31], the design of control protocols is related to some global or unknown knowledge, such as the Laplacian matrix eigenvalue information, and the knowledge of the unknown nonlinear dynamics. To overcome this drawback, the distributed adaptive updating law is proposed.…”

“…It should be pointed out that most of works in [27][28][29][30][31][32][33][34][35] are concerned with the formation control of first-order integer system, which can not accurately characterize some complex dynamic behaviors in practical application. To the best of our knowledge, a few results are concerned with the formation control problem of second-order FMASs.…”

“…An adaptive event-triggered control protocol is developed, where the global information of Laplacian matrix is not required. Different from the proposed state-dependent triggering conditions in [27][28][29][30][31], a constant is introduced into triggering conditions in this paper to address the formation control issue and avoid the occurrence of Zeno behavior.…”