Differentially Private Consensus for Multi-Agent Systems Under Switching Topology

Abstract

Existing results on differentially private consensus of multi-agent systems are limited to fixed interaction topology. This paper focuses on differentially private consensus of discrete-time multi-agent systems over switching networks for the first time. With the design of a distributed communication mechanism, in which the interactive information of each agent transmitted to its neighbors is obscured by uncorrelated random noise, the differential privacy of the agents’ initial states is preserved and the mean-square consensus of the multi-agent system is achieved. Moreover, a weaker noise constraint is given to broaden the existing range of noise selection. Finally, a numerical example verifies the effectiveness of the results.