Exploiting nodes symmetries to control synchronization and consensus patterns in multiagent systems
For control engineers designing distributed networks, this provides a systematic method to induce specific synchronization patterns, though it is an incremental extension of existing symmetry-based approaches.
The paper presents conditions to achieve desired synchronization and consensus patterns in multiagent systems by exploiting symmetries in node dynamics, enabling a systematic distributed controller design.
We present new conditions to obtain synchronization and consensus patterns in complex network systems. The key idea is to exploit symmetries of the nodes' vector fields to induce a desired synchronization/consensus pattern, where nodes are clustered in different groups each converging towards a different synchronized evolution. We show that the new conditions we present offer a systematic methodology to design a distributed network controller able to drive a network of interest towards a desired synchronization/consensus pattern.