Time- and Event-Triggered Communication for Multi-Agent Systems-Part II: Digital Implementation and Resilience

• Published in: IEEE transactions on automatic control Vol. 70; no. 1; pp. 463 - 470
• Main Authors: Scheres, K. J. A., Dolk, V. S., Chong, M. S., Postoyan, R., Heemels, W. P. M. H.
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York IEEE 01.01.2025; The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc. (IEEE); Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
• Subjects: Automatic; Delays; Dissipativity; Engineering Sciences; event-triggered control; Information systems; Mathematical models; Multi-agent systems; Multiagent systems; networked control systems; Packet loss; Protocols; Resilience; Sampling; Synchronization; Networked systems; Lyapunov stability; Hybrid dynamical systems; Event-triggered control; Multi-agent systems; Resilience
• ISSN: 0018-9286; 1558-2523
• DOI: 10.1109/TAC.2024.3427909

We consider the design of event-triggered distributed controllers for multi-agent systems that are digitally implemented on local computation platforms and communicate over a packet-based network. Each agent is equipped with a local triggering mechanism that is only evaluated at the local sampling instants, thereby, taking a periodic event-triggered approach in which the sampling intervals are allowed to vary (jitter). Moreover, the locally triggered transmissions are subject to unknown, bounded delays, and a destination protocol is locally implemented to only send the packet to a selection of the neighboring agents at each triggering instant. Building upon the framework of Part I, we present an emulation-based design of the local periodic event-triggering rules, including the MASP, so that, under appropriate conditions, a general dissipativity property holds for the overall system. Interestingly, the presented digital implementation requires only minor modifications to the conditions presented in Part I. In addition, we show how to exploit the destination protocols to ensure resilience to information loss issues such as packet losses and denial-of-service. We conclude this article with case studies on the consensus of single integrator agents and a nonlinear stabilization problem.