Distributed practical consensus in multi-agent networks with communication constrains

This paper deals with the multi-agent consensus problem subject to communication constrains. Two types of communication constrains are discussed in this paper: i) each agent can only exchange quantized data with its neighbors and ii) each agent can only obtain the delayed information from its neighbors. Solutions of the resulting system are defined in the Filippov sense. For the consensus protocol which only considers quantization effect, we prove that Filippov solutions converge to a practical consensus set in a finite time. For the consensus protocol considering quantization and time delay simultaneously, it is shown that Filippov solutions converge to a practical consensus set asymptotically. Moreover, we also present how initial state of the agents, time delay and quantization parameter affect the final practical consensus set. Numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the obtained theoretical results. © 2012 IEEE.