PhD Comprehensive Seminar | Mana Donganont, Consensus Problems in Multi-agent Systems

MC 5417

Candidate

Mana Donganont | Applied Math, University of Waterloo

Title

Consensus Problems in 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 ying, multiple robot coordination, ocking, consensus or syn-

chronization, cooperative control of vehicle formations, and others. As a fundamental problem

of distributed coordination, consensus means that a group of agents reach an agreement on the

consistent quality by designing appropriate control input based on local information. 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 sys-

tems involving the interaction of continuous and discrete dynamics. 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-time and continuous-time dynamic

agents coexist and interact with each other at the same time. Thus, it is reasonable to study

consensus problems in such hybrid multi-agent systems. Furthermore, by the fact that in real

networks, agents may exchange information with their neighbors regularly, meanwhile, they can

obtain some agents' information from their instantaneous contact, so we aim to study the con-

sensus problems in hybrid multi-agent systems described by impulsive systems. Moreover, since

time-delay is unavoidable in sampling and transmission of the impulsive information , we further

study consensus problems in hybrid multi-agent systems with delayed impulsive topology.