Recent Advances in Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems: A Brief Survey

In this paper, we mainly review the topics in consensus and coordination of multi-agent systems, which have received a tremendous surge of interest and progressed rapidly in the past few years. Focusing on different kinds of constraints on the controller and the self-dynamics of each individual agent, as well as the coordination schemes, we categorize the recent results into the following directions: consensus with constraints, event-based consensus, consensus over signed networks, and consensus of heterogeneous agents. We also review some applications of the very well developed consensus algorithms to the topics such as economic dispatch problem in smart grid and k -means clustering algorithms.

I. Introduction

Distributed coordination in multi-agent systems (MASs) has received much attention from multidisciplinary researchers in a wide range, including biology, physics, and engineering [4], [51]. This is partly due to its wide applications to attitude alignment of satellites, cooperative control of unmanned aerial vehicles, aggregation behavior analysis of animals, etc. [51], [52]. An important problem in distributed coordination is to develop information flow algorithms or protocols, which specify the information exchange between an agent and its neighbors, such that the group as a whole can reach an agreement regarding a certain quantity of interest. This problem is usually termed consensus or synchronization problem [16], [52].