Event-Triggered Bipartite Consensus of Linear Multiagent Systems Under DoS Attacks

This article investigates the bipartite consensus problem for linear multiagent systems (MASs) with cooperative and competitive interactions under denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. Considering that the communication among agents could be jammed by the DoS attacks irregularly, a novel resilient control protocol with a switching feedback gain is first developed for the structurally balanced topology, so that all agents will switch to the secure control mode when the system is attacked by DoS attacks. In order to reduce the energy consumption of the system and avoid continuous communication among agents, an event-triggered scheme based on the state estimator is also introduced in the protocol design, where the Zeno behavior is excluded naturally by setting a strictly positive minimum event interval. Based on the developed event-triggered resilient control protocol, sufficient conditions on the frequency and duration of DoS attacks are established to ensure the realization of bipartite consensus for the MASs. Furthermore, the event-triggered resilient control protocol is extended for agents to achieve bipartite consensus under the structurally unbalanced topology by introducing a pinning control strategy. Finally, two numerical simulations are provided to verify the effectiveness of the theoretical analysis.

I. Introduction

Recent Years have witnessed increasing attention to multiagent systems (MASs) due to their potential applications in broad areas, such as formation control of vehicles [1], distributed sensor networks [2], and distributed smart grids [3]. Driving the states of all agents to a common value through cooperative interactions among agents is a basic problem in MASs, which is usually defined as the consensus problem [4], [5], [6]. It should be noted that cooperative and competitive interactions between agents may coexist in many real-world scenarios, such as social networks [7], [8] and the bidirectional flight of unmanned aerial vehicles [9]. When cooperative and competitive interactions exist among agents simultaneously, the interaction topology among agents can be represented by a signed graph, in which cooperation and competition interactions are denoted by positive and negative edge weights, respectively. In [7], the bipartite consensus is introduced to define a new form of agreement, which means MASs with cooperative and competitive interactions can reach consensus with equal quantity but opposite signs. Subsequently, bipartite consensus control for MASs has become a topic of broad concern due to its theoretical significance and potential application prospects [10], [11], [12].