Output synchronization of wide-area multi-agent systems via an event-triggered hybrid control approach

Abstract

This study considers an output synchronization problem for a clustered multiagent system (CMAS) in a wide-area communication network. Motivated by energy and communication constraints, a wide-area communication network was modeled via a directed graph consisting of clusters, each having a spanning tree with a leader as the root. To avoid continuous updates to the controller, the communications among agents inside each cluster were implemented in an event-triggered manner, and inter-cluster communications were executed by leaders only at the event-triggered time instants. Hybrid reduced-order observers were designed for agents and leaders when only output information was available. To drive all agents to achieve output synchronization, a hybrid event-triggered control strategy was then suggested to each agent. Several sufficient conditions were obtained using the Lyapunov function method for analyzing stability of the hybrid closed-loop CMASs. Simultaneously, any manifestation of Zeno behavior was analyzed and simulation results were shown to illustrate the feasibility of the proposed event-triggered hybrid control strategy.