Distributed event-triggered consensus for nonlinear multi-agent systems subject to cyber attacks

• Published in: Information sciences Vol. 473; pp. 178 - 189
• Main Authors: Ye, Dan, Yang, Xiang
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Elsevier Inc 01.01.2019
• Subjects: Consensus; Cyber attacks; Event-triggered; Global ultimate boundedness; Multi-agent systems; Cyber attacks; Global ultimate boundedness; Consensus; Event-triggered; Multi-agent systems
• ISSN: 0020-0255; 1872-6291
• DOI: 10.1016/j.ins.2018.09.030

•The event-triggered scheme is first applied to distributed consensus controller design of MASs subject to cyber attacks.•The uniform ultimate boundedness of the tracking error has been achieved based on the communication restoration mechanism.•The event-triggered controller scheme proposed in this paper avoids continuous communications among follower agents.•Compared to topologies that are connected or undirected, the considered topology is more general and has wider applications. This paper studies the distributed event-triggered consensus problem for a class of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) subject to cyber attacks. Differing from some existing results for MASs, the case that communication topologies may be subjected to frequently cyber attacks is considered, which will destroy the communication links among agents and result in paralyzed topologies of the whole MASs. It is assumed that the attacks are recoverable and the agents have the ability to abandon communications when the topological graph does not contain any directed spanning tree. In order to reduce the update frequency of the controller, a distributed event-triggered controller protocol for MASs is designed based on the multiple Lyapunov function method to ensure that the global ultimate boundedness of the tracking error can be achieved. Moreover, Zeno behavior can be excluded. Finally, one numerical example is provided to validate our proposed scheme.