Asymptotic consensus and flocking under decaying persistent excitation on rooted digraphs

Abstract

In this paper, we investigate first- and second-order alignment models with non-universal interaction, time delays and possible communication failures, extending the results in [17] to interaction digraphs that are only assumed to be rooted and to a weaker Persistence Excitation Condition. In particular, we allow the amount of interaction over time intervals of fixed length to decay polynomially in time. For the first-order Hegselmann-Krause type model, we prove asymptotic convergence to consensus under a suitable condition relating the decay exponent of the communication weights to the maximal distance from the root. For the second-order Cucker-Smale model, we establish asymptotic flocking under an additional assumption on the decay of the influence function. These results show that collective behavior can still emerge under progressively weakening communication and without requiring strong connectivity of the interaction graph.