Hierarchical event-triggered consensus control for multi-agent systems under external disturbances: A propagation pre-prevention strategy

This paper proposes a hierarchical event-triggered consensus control method for multi-agent systems (MASs) under a directed topology with external disturbances. The proposed approach adopts a two-layer structure that decouples inter-agent cooperation from individual regulation: the upper layer designs a virtual reference system to enable cooperation, while the lower layer focuses on developing tracking controllers for individual agents. This two-layer structure effectively isolates external disturbances from the communication among agents. Thus, it can “pre-prevent” the effects of external disturbances on the cooperation process compared to the most commonly used distributed control methods for solving disturbances. Moreover, continuous communication between agents can be eliminated by the developed dynamic event-triggered mechanism. It is proved that the consensus error converges to zero asymptotically under a strongly connected topology and a more general topology containing a spanning tree. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed control method is illustrated by numerical simulations.