The Group State-consensus Of Heterogeneous Multi-agent Systems

Agent is a system of acting autonomously and achieving a series of pre-set goals or tasks in a complex dynamic environment.Systems composed of multiple agents is called multi-agent systems(MASs).Compared with traditional control systems,MASs have the advantages of reducing costs and improving system efficiency,et al..The consensus is the basis of distributed coordination and cooperative control of MASs.In many practical situations,agents must be able to adapt to the varying environment and then reach different consistent values.Therefore,it is an important issue that appropriate protocols are designed to make agents reach different consistent values,i.e.group consensus problem.In engineering,due to restrictions and external uncertainties,the structure of MASs may be different each other.Heterogeneous MASs(HMASs)with different capabilities and types are more suitable for real-world systems than homogeneous MASs.Hence,it is more valuable to study HMASs.Furthermore,the time delays are unavoidable due to the limited bandwidth and the limited transmission speed,when agents communicate by networks.Time delays have a negative impact on MASs,such as divergence,et al..So Studying group consensus problem of HMASs with time delays has important practical significance.Firstly,the problem of group state-consensus is investigated for a high-order discrete-time HMASs with time delays in this paper.To overcome the negative effects of communication delays,the networked predictive scheme is proposed,and time delays are compensated actively.In addition,by getting rid of a conservation condition of in-degree balance which widely exists in relevant results,necessary and/or sufficient conditions are established for group stateconsensus of discrete-time HMASs.Numerical simulations show that the proposed networked predictive scheme can compensate the communication delays effectively.Secondly,there often exists phenomenon that an agent acting as a leader to lead the entire system to an expected state in the cooperative control of MASs.Moreover,compared to a MAS without a leader,a MAS with a leader can reduce the communication and computational load of the system.Therefore,the problem of group leader-following state-consensus is further investigated for high-order discrete-time HMASs with time delays.Sufficient and necessary conditions are given for HMASs with the communication delays and fixed directed topology.Numerical simulations show that the follower agents of each group can converge to the state of its leader.