Distributed Event-Triggered Impulsive Consensus Control of Nonlinear Multi-Agent Systems Under Malicious Attacks

This paper addresses a secure event-triggered consensus control problem for a class of nonlinear leader-following multi-agent systems (MASs) under denial of service (DoS) attacks and deception attacks. The novelty of this study lies in the development of a secure event-triggered impulsive control (ETIC) method that can effectively deal with the effects of random DoS and deception attacks, while also achieving the desired resource-efficient consensus control performance. More specifically, in order to save the previous communication resources, an event-triggered impulsive consensus control protocol is proposed to reduce data exchanges among the agents. Our further aim is to simultaneously guarantee the mean-square exponential consensus performance of the controlled MAS and achieve attack resilience as well as resource efficiency. Sufficient conditions on the consensus performance analysis are derived, and the lower bound of impulsive sequences is further specified to exclude the Zeno behavior. Finally, a numerical example involving a group of Chua’s circuits is given to illustrate the effectiveness of the derived theoretical results.