Prescribed-Time Consensus and Containment Control of Networked Multiagent Systems

Area of Science:

• Control Systems Engineering
• Networked Systems Theory
• Distributed Computing

Background:

• Finite-time control offers faster convergence than traditional control but lacks uniform settling times.
• Fixed-time control allows for preassigned settling times but with limitations on arbitrary assignment.
• Networked systems require robust control strategies for achieving consensus and containment.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a novel distributed control method for networked systems with prespecifiable convergence time.
• To achieve average consensus and leader-based consensus in prescribed finite time.
• To extend the method for prescribed-time containment control with multiple leaders.

Main Methods:

• A new scaling function is introduced to achieve prespecifiable convergence time.
• The control method is designed for both undirected and directed network topologies.
• The approach is extended to handle multi-leader containment scenarios.

Main Results:

• The proposed method ensures agents reach average consensus in prescribed finite time under undirected connected topology.
• Agents achieve a prescribed-time consensus with the leader's state under directed topology.
• Prescribed-time containment control for multiple leaders is successfully demonstrated.

Conclusions:

• The developed distributed control method effectively achieves consensus and containment within a prespecified time.
• This approach offers superior flexibility in convergence time compared to existing finite-time and fixed-time methods.
• The method is validated through numerical examples, demonstrating its effectiveness and superiority.