A targeting approach to disturbance rejection in multi-agent systems

This paper deals with the control of discrete-time linear multi-agent systems. We adopt and extend the “targeting” approach, first introduced by Spieser and Shams for plant regulation, to the disturbance rejection problem. Specifically, we assume that there are one or more disturbance agents interacting with the plant agents in some known manner. The disturbance signals are assumed to be unmeasured and, for simplicity, constant. Control agents are then introduced to interact with the plant agents, and each control agent is assigned a target plant agent. We derive a necessary condition for successful disturbance rejection, namely that a control agent must be connected to the same plant agent to which a disturbance agent is connected. Based on the idea of integral control and the earlier regulation results of Spieser and Shams, we then propose for the control agents a set of control laws to achieve disturbance rejection.