A Distributed Design and Plug-n-Play Algorithm for Consensus of Constrained Networks

In recent years, significant attention has been devoted to consensus protocols for Multi Agent Systems (MASs). Some of the approaches in the literature design protocol gains and/or coupling strength parameters, requiring global information about the communication topology (e.g., network Laplacian eigenvalues). Other methods circumvent this limitation by adaptively tuning the coupling strengths among network nodes. Nevertheless, such schemes may not work in constrained network scenarios where nodes' coupling strengths and degrees are subject to specific bounds. In this letter we propose a distributed design algorithm to assess leader-follower consensus of direct constrained networks. Additionally, the proposed algorithm has the remarkable feature that addition or removal of an agent (i.e., plug-n-play operation) requires, at most, the controller design of the only agent and an update for the influenced neighbors. A representative numerical example demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.