Consensus Seeking in Large-Scale Multiagent Systems With Hierarchical Switching-Backbone Topology

Recent developments in multiagent consensus problems have heightened the role of network topology when the agent number increases largely. The existing works assume that the convergence evolution typically proceeds over a peer-to-peer architecture where agents are treated equally and communicate directly with perceived one-hop neighbors, thus resulting in slower convergence speed. In this article, we first extract the backbone network topology to provide a hierarchical organization over the original multiagent system (MAS). Second, we introduce a geometric convergence method based on the constraint set (CS) under periodically extracted switching-backbone topologies. Finally, we derive a fully decentralized framework named hierarchical switching-backbone MAS (HSBMAS) that is designed to conduct agents converge to a common stable equilibrium. Provable connectivity and convergence guarantees of the framework are provided when the initial topology is connected. Extensive simulation results on different-type and varying-density topologies have shown the superiority of the proposed framework.