THE CONSENSUS IN MULTI-AGENT SYSTEM WITH SPEED-OPTIMIZED NETWORK

Abstract

In this paper, we mainly investigate the character of consensus convergence speed of Multi-Agent Systems (MAS) with small-world communication network and the method of devising a speed-optimized small-world communication network in consensus problem based on genetic-algorithm (GA). It is found that, for a small-world communication network, the time to reach a consensus changes rapidly with the change of the number of long-range communication links and the agents which the long-range links connect. The convergence speed of consensus of MAS increases rapidly with the number of long-range links increasing. As we construct a small-world communication network for MAS with a smaller network size and fixed long-range links, we can optimize the long-range link configuration using GA methodology to obtain a small-world communication network with faster consensus speed for MAS.