Necessary and Sufficient Conditions for Consensus of Continuous-Time Multiagent Systems With Markovian Switching Topologies and Communication Noises

This paper investigates the mean square consensus problem for continuous-time multiagent systems with randomly switching topologies and noises. The switching is governed by a time-homogeneous Markov process, and each topology corresponds to a state of the process. Meanwhile, the communication noises are also considered for practical applications. We introduce a time-varying gain which can reduce the effect of communication noises. It is shown that the effect of Markovian switching topologies mainly depends on the union of topologies associated with the positive recurrent states of the Markov process. Then, necessary and sufficient conditions can be obtained under a control protocol with time-varying gain. Moreover, we extend our result to the cases where the topological structure is semi-Markovian switching and the elements of transition rate matrix are partly unknown. Finally, we give an example to illustrate the validity of our results.