Connectivity preserved nonlinear time-delayed multiagent systems using neural networks and event-based mechanism

This paper studies how to preserve connectivity for nonlinear time-delayed multiagent systems using event-based mechanism. By using the idea of divide-and-conquer, we divide the distributed controller into five parts to deal with different requirements of the time-delayed multiagent systems, such as eliminating the negative effects of time delays, preserving connectivity, learning the unknown dynamics and achieving consensus. To reduce the communication times among the agents, a centralized event-based protocol is introduced and an event-triggered function is devised to control the frequency of the communication without Zeno behavior. The technique of $$\sigma $$σ-functions is used to exclude the singularity of the established distributed controller. In the simulation example, the results demonstrate the validity of our developed methodology.