In this technical note, we investigate an optimal output consensus problem for heterogeneous uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems. The considered agents are described by high-order nonlinear dynamics subject to both static and dynamic uncertainties. A two-step design, comprising sequential constructions of optimal signal generator and distributed partial stabilization feedback controller, is developed to overcome the difficulties brought by nonlinearities, uncertainties, and optimal requirements. Our study can not only assure an output consensus, but also achieve an optimal agreement characterized by a distributed optimization problem.
This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems subject to different matching uncertainties for both the cases without and with a leader of bounded unknown control input. Due to the existence of nonidentical uncertainties, the multi-agent systems discussed in this paper are essentially heterogeneous. For the case where the communication graph is undirected and connected, a distributed continuous static consensus protocol based on the relative state information is first designed, under which the consensus error is uniformly ultimately bounded and exponential…
Sufficient conditions of consensus (synchronization) in networks described by digraphs and consisting of identical determenistic SIMO systems are derived. Identical and nonidentical control gains (positive arc weights) are considered. Connection between admissible digraphs and nonsmooth hypersurfaces (sufficient gain boundary) is established. Necessary and sufficient conditions for static consensus by output feedback in networks consisting of certain class of double integrators are rediscovered. Scalability for circle digraph in terms of gain magnitudes is studied. Examples and results of nume…
In this paper, the practical output consensus problem for heterogeneous high-order leader-follower multi-agent systems under directed communication topology containing a directed spanning tree and subject to large-scale mismatched disturbances, mismatched uncertainties, and measurement noises is addressed. By introducing a reversible state transformation without changing the output, the actual total disturbance affecting output performance of each agent and matched with the control input of the transformed system is extracted and estimated by extended state observers. Then, the control protoco…
In this paper, we consider a robust consensus tracking problem of heterogeneous multi-agent systems with time-varying interconnection topologies. Based on common Lyapunov function and internal model techniques, both state and output feedback control laws are derived to solve this problem. The proposed design is robust by admitting some parameter uncertainties in the multi-agent system.
In this paper, we study the robustness of the event-triggered consensus algorithms against frequency-domain uncertainties. It is revealed that the sampling errors resulted by event triggering are essentially images of linear finite-gain $\mathcal{L}_2$-stable operators acting on the consensus errors of the sampled states and the event-triggered mechanism is equivalent to a negative feedback loop introduced additionally to the feedback system. In virtue of this, the robust consensus problem of the event-triggered network systems subject to additive dynamic uncertainties and network multiplicati…
In this paper we consider the output consensus problem of networked Hammerstein and Wiener systems in a noisy environment. The Hammerstein or Wiener system is assumed to be open-loop stable, and its static nonlinearity is allowed to grow up but not faster than a polynomial. A control algorithm based on the distributed stochastic approximation algorithm with expanding truncations is designed and it is shown that under the designed control the output consensus is achieved. The numerical simulation given in the paper justifies the theoretical assertions.
This paper presents the formulation and analysis of a novel distributed maximum likelihood algorithm that utilizes a first-order optimization scheme. The proposed approach utilizes a static average consensus algorithm to reach agreement on the initial condition to the iterative optimization scheme and a dynamic average consensus algorithm to reach agreement on the gradient direction. The current distributed algorithm is guaranteed to exponentially recover the performance of the centralized algorithm. Though the current formulation focuses on maximum likelihood algorithm built on first-order me…
This paper addresses a multi-stage generation investment problem for a strategic (price-maker) power producer in electricity markets. This problem is exposed to different sources of uncertainty, including short-term operational (e.g., rivals' offering strategies) and long-term macro (e.g., demand growth) uncertainties. This problem is formulated as a stochastic bilevel optimization problem, which eventually recasts as a large-scale stochastic mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) problem with limited computational tractability. To cope with computational issues, we propose a consensus versio…
In this paper, we propose state- and static output-feedback generalized guaranteed cost control (GCC) approaches for discrete-time linear systems subject to norm-bounded structured parametric uncertainties. This method enables the convex synthesis for a more general class of systems, where uncertainties are uncorrelated block diagonal, and no feed-through uncertainty is multiplicative with control input ones. It also provides necessary and sufficient conditions for state-feedback and sufficient conditions for static output-feedback. We also present a comparative study among the proposed contro…
We consider cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over both static and time-varying communication networks, where only local communications are allowed. The objective is to minimize the sum of agent-specific possibly non-smooth composite convex functions over agent-specific private conic constraint sets; hence, the optimal consensus decision should lie in the intersection of these private sets. Assuming the sum function is strongly convex, we provide convergence rates in suboptimality, infeasibility and consensus violation; examine the effect of underlying network topology on…
The distributed optimal output consensus problem for high-order multi-agent systems has been studied recently. In this paper, we further focus on the same problem for high-order multi-agent systems subject to parametric uncertainties and aim at distributed robust controllers by measurement output feedback. We first develop a dynamic compensator to estimate the expected optimal consensus point and convert the problem into several decentralized robust tracking problems. Then, by combining the integral control technique and dirty derivative observer technique, we constructively propose a distribu…
This paper investigates the distributed optimal output consensus problem of second-order uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems over weight-unbalanced directed networks. Under the standard assumption that local cost functions are strongly convex with globally Lipschitz gradients, a novel distributed dynamic state feedback controller is developed such that the outputs of all the agents reach the optimal solution to minimize the global cost function which is the sum of all the local cost functions. The controller design is based on a two-layer strategy, where a distributed optimal coordinator a…
In this paper we study the distributed average consensus problem in multi-agent systems with directed communication links that are subject to quantized information flow. Specifically, we present and analyze a distributed averaging algorithm which operates exclusively with quantized values (i.e., the information stored, processed and exchanged between neighboring agents is subject to deterministic uniform quantization) and relies on event-driven updates (e.g., to reduce energy consumption, communication bandwidth, network congestion, and/or processor usage). The main idea of the proposed algori…
Given an undirected graph $\mathcal{G}=(\mathcal{N},\mathcal{E})$ of agents $\mathcal{N}=\{1,\ldots,N\}$ connected with edges in $\mathcal{E}$, we study how to compute an optimal decision on which there is consensus among agents and that minimizes the sum of agent-specific private convex composite functions $\{Φ_i\}_{i\in\mathcal{N}}$ while respecting privacy requirements, where $Φ_i\triangleq ξ_i + f_i$ belongs to agent-$i$. Assuming only agents connected by an edge can communicate, we propose a distributed proximal gradient method DPGA for consensus optimization over both unweighted and weig…
This paper deals with transient stability in interconnected micro-grids. The main contribution involves i) robust classification of transient dynamics for different intervals of the micro-grid parameters (synchronization, inertia, and damping); ii) exploration of the analogies with consensus dynamics and bounds on the damping coefficient separating underdamped and overdamped dynamics iii) the extension to the case of disturbed measurements due to hackering or parameter uncertainties.
We propose a new decentralized average consensus algorithm with compressed communication that scales linearly with the network size n. We prove that the proposed method converges to the average of the initial values held locally by the agents of a network when agents are allowed to communicate with compressed messages. The proposed algorithm works for a broad class of compression operators (possibly biased), where agents interact over arbitrary static, undirected, and connected networks. We further present numerical experiments that confirm our theoretical results and illustrate the scalabilit…
In this paper, cluster consensus of multi-agent systems is studied via inter-cluster nonidentical inputs. Here, we consider general graph topologies, which might be time-varying. The cluster consensus is defined by two aspects: the intra-cluster synchronization, that the state differences between each pair of agents in the same cluster converge to zero, and inter-cluster separation, that the states of the agents in different clusters are separated. For intra-cluster synchronization, the concepts and theories of consensus including the spanning trees, scramblingness, infinite stochastic matrix …
We propose decentralized primal-dual methods for cooperative multi-agent consensus optimization problems over both static and time-varying communication networks, where only local communications are allowed. The objective is to minimize the sum of agent-specific convex functions over conic constraint sets defined by agent-specific nonlinear functions; hence, the optimal consensus decision should lie in the intersection of these private sets. Under the strong convexity assumption, we provide convergence rates for sub-optimality, infeasibility, and consensus violation in terms of the number of c…
We analyze networked heterogeneous nonlinear systems, with diffusive coupling and interconnected over a generic static directed graph. Due to the network's hetereogeneity, complete synchronization is impossible, in general, but an emergent dynamics arises. This may be characterized by two dynamical systems evolving in two time-scales. The first, "slow", corresponds to the dynamics of the network on the synchronization manifold. The second, "fast", corresponds to that of the synchronization errors. We present a framework to analyse the emergent dynamics based on the behavior of the slow dynamic…
This paper considers the distributed robust suboptimal consensus control problem of linear multi-agent systems, with both H2 and H_infty performance requirements. A novel two-step complementary design approach is proposed. In the first step, a distributed control law is designed for the nominal multi-agent system to achieve consensus with a prescribed H2 performance. In the second step, an extra control input, depending on some carefully chosen residual signals indicating the modeling mismatch, is designed to complement the H2 performance by providing robustness guarantee in terms of H_infty r…
We study the decentralized consensus and stochastic optimization problems with compressed communications over static directed graphs. We propose an iterative gradient-based algorithm that compresses messages according to a desired compression ratio. The proposed method provably reduces the communication overhead on the network at every communication round. Contrary to existing literature, we allow for arbitrary compression ratios in the communicated messages. We show a linear convergence rate for the proposed method on the consensus problem. Moreover, we provide explicit convergence rates for …
This article addresses the problem of average consensus in a multi-agent system when the desired consensus quantity is a time varying signal. Recently, the EDCHO protocol leveraged high order sliding modes to achieve exact consensus under a constrained set of initial conditions, limiting its applicability to static networks. In this work, we propose REDCHO, an extension of the previous protocol which is robust to mismatch in the initial conditions, making it suitable to use cases in which connection and disconnection of agents is possible. The convergence properties of the protocol are formall…
This paper presents new classes of consensus protocols with fixed-time convergence, which enable the definition of an upper bound for consensus state as a parameter of the consensus protocol, ensuring its independence from the initial condition of the nodes. We demonstrate that our methodology subsumes current classes of fixed-time consensus protocols that are based on homogeneous in the bi-limit vector fields. Moreover, the proposed framework enables for the development of independent consensus protocols that are not needed to be homogeneous in the bi-limit. This proposal offers extra degrees…
Shunt FACTS devices, such as, a Static Var Compensator (SVC), are capable of providing local reactive power compensation. They are widely used in the network to reduce the real power loss and improve the voltage profile. This paper proposes a planning model based on mixed integer conic programming (MICP) to optimally allocate SVCs in the transmission network considering load uncertainty. The load uncertainties are represented by a number of scenarios. Reformulation and linearization techniques are utilized to transform the original non-convex model into a convex second order cone programming (…
Opinion Dynamics in Social Networks with Hostile Camps: Consensus vs. Polarization
University of Groningen（格罗宁根大学）；St. Petersburg State University（圣彼得堡国立大学）；ITMO University（ITMO大学）；Institute for Problems of Mechanical Engineering of Russian Academy of Sciences (IPME RAS)（俄罗斯科学院机械问题研究所）
In this note, a novel observer-based output feedback control approach is proposed to address the distributed optimal output consensus problem of uncertain nonlinear multi-agent systems in the normal form over unbalanced directed graphs. The main challenges of the concerned problem lie in unbalanced directed graphs and nonlinearities of multi-agent systems with their agent states not available for feedback control. Based on a two-layer controller structure, a distributed optimal coordinator is first designed to convert the considered problem into a reference-tracking problem. Then a decentraliz…
This paper considers the robustness of event-triggered control of general linear systems against additive or multiplicative frequency-domain uncertainties. It is revealed that in static or dynamic event triggering mechanisms, the sampling errors are images of affine operators acting on the sampled outputs. Though not belonging to $\mathcal{RH}_\infty$, these operators are finite-gain $\mathcal{L}_2$ stable with operator-norm depending on the triggering conditions and the norm bound of the uncertainties. This characterization is further extended to the general integral quadratic constraint (IQC…
We consider solving a convex, possibly stochastic optimization problem over a randomly time-varying multi-agent network. Each agent has access to some local objective function, and it only has unbiased estimates of the gradients of the smooth component. We develop a dynamic stochastic proximal-gradient consensus (DySPGC) algorithm, with the following key features: i) it works for both the static and certain randomly time-varying networks, ii) it allows the agents to utilize either the exact or stochastic gradient information, iii) it is convergent with provable rate. In particular, we show tha…
In this paper, the notion of robust strict QSR-dissipativity is applied to solve the static output feedback control problem for a class of continuous-time nonlinear rational systems subject to input saturation and bounded parametric uncertainties. A local dissipativity condition is combined with generalized sector conditions to formulate the synthesis of a stabilizing controller in terms of linear matrix inequalities. The strategy applies to general static output feedback design without any restrictions on the plant output equation. An iterative algorithm based on linear matrix inequalities is…
