An event-triggered consensus protocol for quantized second-order multi-agent systems with network delay and process noise.

Abstract This paper focuses on the quantized consensus problem of discrete-time second-order multi-agent systems which suffer from bounded process noise. In such systems, neighboring agents exchange information through a digital network that has only a finite bit rate and is subject to bounded network delay. Network delay may exacerbate the effects of quantization error and degrade the control performance by reducing the information to be extracted from receiving time instants of exchange packets. To handle network delay and save communication bit rates, an event-triggered distributed control protocol based on a dynamic encoding–decoding policy is proposed. Under the proposed event-triggered protocol, the asymptotic consensus of the concerned noise-free multi-agent systems can be achieved at a lower bit rate than that of periodic sampling control. This bit rate superiority results from the fact that our protocol makes use of the extra information being extracted from the event-triggering time instants. Moreover, it is shown that no higher bit rate is required to guarantee the desired consensus in the existence of bounded process noise. Simulations are done to demonstrate the effectiveness of our consensus protocol. As shown by our numerical examples, the occupied bit rate to ensure the desired consensus can be saved by up to 50% compared with periodic sampling strategies.