Secure consensus with partial public protocols

Abstract

Existing consensus designs require that the information of local control laws is open access. This is undesirable whenever the privacy of local interactions is concerned. In this paper, a different framework of the consensus protocol design with the consideration of authority management of accessing local controllers is provided, by using an edge-based implementation. In the scenario of the proposed designs, each local controller is realized by a parallel connection of a public element and a private element. The public elements are uniform and open access. However, the private elements are allowed to be significant nonuniform and are only known by the pairs of agents who share them. For both continuous-time multi-agent systems and their sampled-data counterparts, we provide the design criterions for the partial public protocols under both static and dynamic public elements, respectively. By exploring the edge sensitivity design approach, it is shown that the consensus can be achieved under the proposed protocols if the private control laws satisfy certain constraints dependent on the public ones and the network topologies. Numerical examples are also provided to illustrate the proposed design criterions.