Distributed Subgradient Method With Edge-Based Event-Triggered Communication

Abstract

This paper proposes a distributed subgradient method for constrained optimization with event-triggered communications. In the proposed method, each agent has an estimate of an optimal solution as a state and iteratively updates it by a consensus-based subgradient algorithm with a projection to a common constraint set. The local communications are carried out by the edge-based triggering mechanism when the difference between the current state and the last triggered state exceeds a threshold. We show that the states of all agents asymptotically converge to one of the optimal solutions under a diminishing and summability condition on a stepsize and a threshold for a trigger condition. We also investigate the convergence rate with respect to the time-averaged state of each agent. The simulation results show that the proposed event-triggered algorithm can reduce the number of communications compared to the time-triggered algorithms.