Consensus Tracking of Heterogeneous Discrete-Time Networked Multiagent Systems Based on the Networked Predictive Control Scheme

This paper studies the problem of consensus tracking for heterogeneous discrete-time networked multiagent systems (NMASs) with network-induced communication delay. By introducing the networked predictive control scheme, novel consensus tracking protocols are designed to ensure that states of the NMASs follow the external reference signal. One of the agents is defined as the leader agent, all the other agents are defined as the followers, and the external reference signal is always known by the leader agent, both cases where the external reference signal is available and unavailable to the follower agents are discussed in this paper. The necessary and sufficient conditions for the novel consensus tracking protocols are proposed based on algebraic and graph theory. Numerical examples are given to validate the theoretical results.