Prescribed-time consensus control of nonlinear time-delayed multi-agent systems under DoS attacks

Area of Science:

• Control Theory
• Networked Systems
• Cybersecurity

Background:

• Multi-agent systems face challenges like communication delays and denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
• Achieving consensus in finite or prescribed time is crucial for coordinated system behavior.

Purpose of the Study:

• To develop a control protocol for secure prescribed-time consensus in multi-agent systems.
• To address time-varying communication delays and general DoS attacks.
• To ensure timely state information dissemination among agents.

Main Methods:

• A novel control protocol incorporating integral action and time-varying delays.
• Artstein's reducing transformation for handling time-varying delays.
• Lyapunov stability theory and comparison principles for analysis.

Main Results:

• Sufficient criteria for consensus convergence under DoS attacks and delays were derived.
• A distributed observer guarantees followers obtain leader states within prescribed time.
• The proposed methods ensure secure and robust prescribed-time consensus.

Conclusions:

• The developed control strategy and observer effectively achieve secure prescribed-time consensus.
• The findings are validated through numerical simulations, demonstrating robustness.
• This research contributes to secure and efficient coordination in networked systems.