Differentially Private Consensus for Time-Delay Multi-agent Systems

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the differentially private consensus problem for discrete-time multi-agent systems with communication delays. The purpose of the paper is to achieve differentially private consensus for such systems while protecting the entire delayed initial histories of all agents. A novel adjacency relation for delayed histories is introduced, and a Laplace-noise-based privacy mechanism is developed, where the noise variance is allowed to vary with time and even increase. By using the difference resolvent function method, decay estimates for the fundamental solutions of the delayed difference equations are derived. Based on these estimates and a backstepping technique, mean square weak consensus, mean square strong consensus, and almost sure strong consensus are established. The estimates for the fundamental solutions are also used to derive an explicit sensitivity bound. Furthermore, a constructive parameter design is provided to achieve a prescribed infinite-horizon $ε^\star$-differential privacy level. Numerical simulations illustrate the theoretical results.