2017/03/08 by Anton V. Proskurnikov, Proskurnikov, Anton V., Manuel Mazo +1
Computer Science · #Distributed Control Multi-Agent Systems #FOS: Electrical engineering #Neural Networks Stability and Synchronization #Nonlinear Dynamics and Pattern Formation #Systems and Control (eess.SY) #electronic engineering #information engineering
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1703.02937
openalex publication_date 2017/03/08 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Synchronization among autonomous agents via local interactions is one of the\nbenchmark problems in multi-agent control. Whereas synchronization algorithms\nfor identical agents have been thoroughly studied, synchronization of\nheterogeneous networks still remains a challenging problem. The existing\nalgorithms primarily use the internal model principle, assigning to each agent\na local copy of some dynamical system (internal model). Synchronization of\nheterogeneous agents thus reduces to global synchronization of identical\ngenerators and local synchronization between the agents and their internal\nmodels. The internal model approach imposes a number of restrictions and leads\nto sophisticated dynamical (and, in general, nonlinear) controllers. At the\nsame time, passive heterogeneous agents can be synchronized by a very simple\nlinear protocol, which is used for consensus of first-order integrators. A\nnatural question arises whether analogous algorithms are applicable to\nsynchronization of agents that do not satisfy the passivity condition. In this\npaper, we study the synchronization problem for heterogeneous agents that are\nnot passive but satisfy a weaker input feedforward passivity (IFP) condition.\nWe show that such agents can also be synchronized by a simple linear protocol,\nprovided that the interaction graph is strongly connected and the couplings are\nsufficiently weak. We demonstrate how stability of cooperative adaptive cruise\ncontrol algorithms and some microscopic traffic flow models reduce to\nsynchronization of heterogeneous IFP agents.\n