Distributed consensus tracking for multi-agent systems under two types of attacks

This paper studies a distributed coordinated control problem for a class of linear multi-agent systems subject to two types of attacks. The problem boils down to how to achieve secure consensus tracking for multi-agent systems with connected and disconnected (paralyzed) directed switching topologies caused by two types of attacks. The attacks on the edges instead of nodes lead to the loss of security performance. Two cases are studied in this paper. First, under only a class of connectivity-maintained attacks, sufficient conditions are derived to achieve secure consensus tracking in mean-square. Second, when the multi-agent systems are further subject to a class of connectivity-broken attacks, novel sufficient conditions are further obtained to ensure secure consensus tracking with a specified convergence rate by virtue of the idea of average dwell time switching between some stable and unstable subsystems. Three numerical simulations are finally given to illustrate the theoretical analysis. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.