PhD Comprehensive Exam | Mana Donganont, Some problems in hybrid multi-agent systems

MC 6460

Candidate

Mana Donganont | Applied Math, University of Waterloo

Title

Some problems in hybrid multi-agent systems

 Abstract

A multi-agent system is a dynamic system that consists of a group of interacting agents distributed over a network.  In the past decades, the study of distributed coordination of multi-agent systems has been widely attached by many groups of researchers such as mathematicians, engineers, physicists, and others. This is partly due to its various applications in many areas, including spacecraft formation flying, multiple robot coordination, flocking, consensus or synchronization, cooperative control of vehicle formations, and others. As one of the most important problems in distributed coordination, consensus means that a group of agents achieves an agreement on a common value by designing the control law which is based on the information receiving by interacting with neighbors. There are many consensus methods that have been studied in the recent years. Some problems focused on seeking the consensus of continuous-time multi-agent systems or discrete-time multi-agent systems, the others considered consensus problems on hybrid systems which are dynamical systems involving the interaction of continuous and discrete dynamics.

Recently, many consensus algorithms have been proposed for the multi-agent systems, but most results of consensus analysis are on the situation that all agents are continuous-time or discrete-time dynamic behavior at the same time. There are, however, some situations that the discrete and continuous dynamic agents coexist and interact with each other at the same time, so it is reasonable to study consensus problems in such hybrid multi-agent systems.

The purpose of this work is to study the consensus problems in hybrid multi-agent systems under directed topology and undirected topology. Furthermore, consensus problems of nonlinear hybrid multi-agent systems and edge consensus problems of hybrid multi-agent systems are also studied.