Controllability of heterogeneous multiagent systems

Abstract

Summary The existing results on controllability of multiagent systems (MASs) are mostly based on homogeneous nodes. This paper focuses on controllability of heterogeneous MASs, where the agents are modeled as two types. One type is that the agents have the same high‐order dynamics, and the interconnection topologies of the information flow in different orders are supposed to be different; the other type is that the agents have generic linear dynamics, and the dynamics are supposed to be heterogeneous. For the first type, the necessary and sufficient condition for controllability of heterogeneous‐topology system is derived via combination of Laplacian matrices. For the second type, the contribution also has two parts. The first part supposes that the agents have the same dimensional states and proves that controllability of this kind of MASs is equivalent to the controllability of each node and the whole interconnection topology, while the last parameter of the state feedback vector must not be 0. The second part supposes that the agents may have different dimensional states. For this kind of systems, the concept of β‐controllability is proposed. The necessary and sufficient condition for β‐controllability of heterogeneous‐dynamic systems is also derived and it is also proved that the feedback gain vectors have the effect to improve controllability. Different illustrative examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results in this paper.

Structural controllability of multi‐agent systems with directed switching topologies

“…For the controllability of MASs, graph theory is widely applied to analyze the intrinsic connection between controllability and interaction topology structure (see more in previous research [9][10][11][12]). For instance, a new graphical characterization, destructive nodes, is defined to distinguish the controllability interaction topology [9] and equitable partitions are proposed to represent the controllability condition [10].…”

Observer‐based distributed average tracking of second‐order multi‐agent systems with disturbances

“…The adaptive neural network optimal consensus tracking control for multi‐agent systems with random disturbances and actuator bias faults is investigated in Reference 20. Reference 21 proposes a fully distributed approach for achieving secure consensus in leaderless nonlinear multi‐agent systems with communication link attacks, utilizing a virtual reference state estimator and a linear matrix inequality‐based design. An algorithm and conditions for achieving resilient consensus in multi‐agent systems with malicious agents and communication delays are proposed in Reference 22.…”

Relative Controllability of Hybrid Delay Multi-agent Systems

“…Ji et al [14] agent systems with each agent updating its state by a common generic linear dynamics is also tackled in [16]. Zhao et al [17] generalize the control problem of homogeneous multi-agent systems to heterogeneous ones, where each agent follows different generic linear dynamics. More information about the controllability of generic linear dynamic agents one can find in [18].…”