Group consensus of multi-agent systems with directed information exchange

We discuss a new consensus problem – a group consensus problem – in networks of dynamic agents. For a complex network consisting of several sub-networks owing to physical quantities or task distributions, it is concerned with this case that the agents in a sub-network share a consistent value while there is no agreement between any two sub-networks. When the information exchange is directed, a novel consensus protocol is designed to solve the group consensus problem. The convergence analysis is discussed and several criteria are established based on graph theories and matrix theories. Simulation results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.