Practical Time-Synchronized Consensus Control with an Event-Triggered Mechanism

Time-synchronized control allows each agent state component to simultaneously achieve consensus in finite time. This synchronized performance of the convergence relies on continuous communication between agents to obtain the real-time state information of their neighbors, presenting a communication challenge for resource-constraint multi-agent systems. This paper proves that, to achieve exact time-synchronized consensus in multi-agent systems, the common state-dependent event-triggered mechanisms lead to the Zeno behavior. As a trade-off to avoid Zeno behavior, a minimum inter-event time is introduced to design the distributed controllers with the event-triggered mechanism for both first- and second-order dynamics systems. The influence of the inter-event time on the control performance is analyzed, which guarantees to achieve practical time-synchronized consensus with bounded error. Especially for second-order dynamics systems, a time-synchronized sliding-mode surface is designed and, its potential singularity is avoided. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that the controllers achieve quasi-synchronous state convergence with guaranteed performance under discrete communication.