Distributed event-triggered coordination for average consensus on weight-balanced digraphs

Abstract

This paper proposes a novel distributed event-triggered algorithmic solution to the multi-agent average consensus problem for networks whose communication topology is described by weight-balanced, strongly connected digraphs. The proposed event-triggered communication and control strategy does not rely on individual agents having continuous or periodic access to information about the state of their neighbors. In addition, it does not require the agents to have a priori knowledge of any global parameter. We show that, under the proposed law, events cannot be triggered an infinite number of times in any finite period (i.e., no Zeno behavior), and that the resulting network executions provably converge to the average of the initial agents' states exponentially fast. We also provide weaker conditions on connectivity under which convergence is guaranteed when the communication topology is switching. Simulations illustrate our results.