Average-consensus Of Multi-agent Systems With Distributed Time Delay

In recent years, multi-agent system became an emerging science of complexsystems. Meanwhile, it is a comprehensive interdisciplinary involving physics,biology, control, mathematics, computer, communications, artificial intelligence, andso on. Multi-agent system is a collection of many autonomous intelligent agents, inwhich each agent represents a physical or abstract entity. They can respond toenvironmental changes, freely interact with each other, and complete more complextasks. Lots of groups of organisms in nature have self-organized group behavior, suchas migratory birds in formation, collaborative division of ant populations, collectiveforaging of microorganisms, and so on. These phenomena promoted the rise ofresearch on multi-agent systems in controlled scientific fields. Currently, the coreproblem of research on multi-agent systems is the consensus issue, which is originallyintroduced in the study of management science and statistics in1960. In1992,Benediktsson et al. applied the thought of consensus in statistics on informationfusion of sensor networks, which opened the prelude of consensus in the system andcontrol theory.This thesis is mainly concerned with the average consensus and relative issues ofmulti-agent systems with distributed time delay. The main contributions are list asfollows:Chapter1mainly introduces the background and development of the studies onmulti-agent systems, provides some needed preliminaries including definitions,lemmas and assumptions as well as presents the organization of this thesis.Chapter2studies the average consensus of multi-agent systems with distributedtime delay. Multi-agent systems with undirected and directed topological structure areboth considered. Based on Lyapunov-Krasovskii function method and linear matrixinequality theory, some sufficient conditions for achieving average consensus arederived and verified by some numerical examples.Chapter3studies finite-time average consensus of multi-agent systems withdistributed time delay. Based on Lyapunov function method and finite-time stability theory of differential equations, some sufficient conditions for achieving finite-timeaverage consensus are derived and verified by some numerical examples.Chapter4concludes this thesis and brings forward the future research plans.