Emergent Dynamics of Asynchronous Multiagent Systems Under Signed Networks and Limited Communication Resources

Signed networks, usually used to describe cooperative and competitive coordination between agents, have potential applications in fields such as multi-robot formation and opinion dynamics, et al. Existing work on multi-agent dynamics on signed networks assumes that all agents communicate with their neighbors synchronously, which usually requires sufficient communication resources. However, due to the shortage of communication resources in practical applications, the synchronous communication manner is often not easy to achieve, especially on large scale networks. With that in mind, this paper proposes an asynchronous communication manner to investigate the dynamic behavior of multiagent systems on signed networks without structural restrictions, where only part of the communication links are allowed to transmit information each time instant. By designing a distributed feedback control law, the related properties of sub-stochastic matrices can be used to analyze the dynamic behavior of the agents. It turns out that the whole multi-agent system will evolve a variety of dynamic behaviors, including consensus, bipartite consensus and bipartite containment, which is influenced by the locations and roles of agents in the network. At last, computer simulations are provided to demonstrate the theoretical discovery.