Convergence in Multiagent Coordination, Consensus, and Flocking

We discuss an old distributed algorithm for reaching consensus that has received a fair amount of recent attention. In this algorithm, a number of agents exchange their values asynchronously and form weighted averages with (possibly outdated) values possessed by their neighbors. We overview existing convergence results, and establish some new ones, for the case of unbounded intercommunication intervals.

[1]  J. Wolfowitz.  Products of indecomposable, aperiodic, stochastic matrices , 1963 .

[2]  John N. Tsitsiklis,et al.  Problems in decentralized decision making and computation , 1984 .

[3]  John N. Tsitsiklis,et al.  Distributed Asynchronous Deterministic and Stochastic Gradient Optimization Algorithms , 1984, 1984 American Control Conference.

[4]  Dimitri P. Bertsekas,et al.  Data Networks , 1986 .

[5]  John N. Tsitsiklis,et al.  Parallel and distributed computation , 1989 .

[6]  George Cybenko,et al.  Dynamic Load Balancing for Distributed Memory Multiprocessors , 1989, J. Parallel Distributed Comput..

[7]  Vicsek,et al.  Novel type of phase transition in a system of self-driven particles. , 1995, Physical review letters.

[8]  Jie Lin,et al.  Coordination of groups of mobile autonomous agents using nearest neighbor rules , 2003, IEEE Trans. Autom. Control..

[9]  Huaiqing Wang,et al.  Multi-agent coordination using nearest neighbor rules: revisiting the Vicsek model , 2004, ArXiv.

[10]  Richard M. Murray,et al.  Consensus problems in networks of agents with switching topology and time-delays , 2004, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[11]  D. Angeli,et al.  Stability of leaderless multi-agent systems. Extension of a result by Moreau , 2004, math/0411338.

[12]  D. Angeli,et al.  Extension of a result by Moreau on stability of leaderless multi-agent systems. , 2005, Proceedings of the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control.

[13]  Luc Moreau,et al.  Stability of multiagent systems with time-dependent communication links , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control.

[14]  Stephen P. Boyd,et al.  Gossip algorithms: design, analysis and applications , 2005, Proceedings IEEE 24th Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies..

[15]  Ming Cao,et al.  COORDINATION OF AN ASYNCHRONOUS MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM VIA AVERAGING , 2005 .

[16]  Benjamin Van Roy,et al.  Consensus Propagation , 2005, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory.

[17]  V. Blondel,et al.  Convergence of different linear and non-linear Vicsek models , 2006 .