Consensus of multi-agent systems under switching agent dynamics and jumping network topologies

Consensus of multi-agent systems is an interesting research topic and has wide applications in science and engineering. The agents considered in most existing studies on consensus problem are time-invariant. However, in many cases, agent dynamics often show the characteristic of switching during the process of consensus. This paper considers consensus problem of general linear multi-agent system under both switching agent dynamics and jumping network topologies. Within the proposed multi-agent system, the agent dynamic switching is assumed to be deterministic, while the network topology jumping is considered respectively for two cases: deterministic jumping (Case 1) and Markov jumping (Case 2). By applying the dwell time and the average dwell time techniques, a sufficient consensus and an almost sure consensus conditions are provided for these two cases, respectively. Finally, two numerical examples are presented to demonstrate the theoretical results.