Consensuability Conditions of Multi Agent Systems with Varying Interconnection Topology and Different Kinds of Node Dynamics

Many systems in nature and of practical interest can be modeled as large collections of interacting subsystems. Such systems are referred as "Multi Agent Systems" (briefly MASs) and some examples include electrical power distribution networks (P. Kundur, 1994), communication (F. Paganini, 2001), and collections of vehicles traveling in formation (J.K. Hedrick et al., 1990). Several practical issues concern the design of decentralized controllers and the stability analysis ofMASs in the presence of uncertainties in the subsystem interconnection topology (i.e. due in practical applications to failures of transmission lines). The analysis and control of collections of interconnected systems have been widely studied in the literature. Early work on stability analysis and decentralized control of large-scale interconnected systems is found in (D. Limebeer & Y.S. Hung, 1983; A. Michel & R. Miller, 1977; P.J. Moylan & D.J. Hill, 1978; Siljak, 1978; J.C. Willems, 1976). Some of the more widely notable stability criteria are based on the passivity conditions (M. Vidyasagar, 1977) and on the well-known notion of connective stability introduced in (Siljak, 1978). More recently, MASs have appeared broadly in several applications including formation flight, sensor networks, swarms, collective behavior of flocks (Savkin, 2004; C.C. Cheaha et al., 2009; W. Ren, 2009) motivating the recent significative attention of the scientific community to distributed control and consensus problems (i.e. (R.O. Saber & R. Murray, 2004; Z. Lin et al., 2004; V. Blondel et al., 2005; J. N. Tsitsiklis et al., 1986)). One common feature of the consensus algorithm is to allow every agent automatically converge to a common consensus state using only local information received from its neighboring agents. "Consensusability" of MASs is a fundamental problem concerning with the existence conditions of the consensus state and it is of great importance in both theoretical and practical features of cooperative protocol (i.e. flocking, rendezvous problem, robot coordination). Results about consensuability of MASs are related to first and second order systems and are based on the assumption of jointly-connected interaction graphs (i.e. in (R.O. Saber & R. Murray, 2004; J. N. Tsitsiklis et al., 1986)). Extension to more general linear MASs whose agents are described by LTI (Linear Time Invariant) systems can be found in (Tuna, 2008) where the closed-loop MASs were shown to be asymptotic consensus stable if the topology had a spanning tree. In (L. Scardovi & R. Sepulchre, 2009) it is investigated the synchronization of a Consensuability Conditions of Multi Agent Systems with Varying Interconnection Topology and Different Kinds of Node Dynamics 18 network of identical linear state-space models under a possibly time-varying and directed interconnection structure. Many investigations are carried out when the dynamic structure is fixed and the communication topology is time varying (i.e. in (R.O. Saber & R. Murray, 2004; W. Ren & R. W. Beard, 2005; Ya Zhanga & Yu-Ping Tian, 2009)). One of main appealing field of research is the investigation of the MASs consensusability under both the dynamic agent structure and communication topology variations. In particular, it is worth analyzing the joint impact of the agent dynamic and the communication topology on the MASs consensusability. The aim of the chapter is to give consensusability conditions of LTI MASs as function of the agent dynamic structure, communication topology and coupling strength parameters. The theoretical results are derived by transferring the consensusability problem into the robust stability analysis of LTI-MASs. Differently from the existing works, here the consensuability conditions are given in terms of the adjacency matrix rather than Laplacian matrix.Moreover, it is shown that the interplay among consensusability, node dynamic and topology must be taken into account for MASs stabilization: specifically, consensuability of MASs is assessed for all topologies, dynamic and coupling strength satisfying a pre-specified bound. From the practical point of view the consensuability conditions can be used for both the analysis and planning of MASs protocols to guarantee robust stability for a wide range of possible interconnection topologies, coupling strength and node dynamics. Also, the number of subsystems affecting the overall system stability is taken into account as it is analyzed the robustness of multi agent systems if the number of subsystems changes. Finally, simulation examples are given to illustrate the theoretical analysis. 2.