Average Consensus in Directed Networks of Dynamic Agents with Time-Varying Communication Delays

In this paper, we discuss average consensus problem in directed networks of dynamic agents with fixed, switching, or dynamically changing topologies as well as time-varying communication delays. The main contribution of this paper is that we prove average consensus of all the nodes in the network will be preserved for a suitable upper bound of the time-varying communication delay if the network topology is strongly connected and balanced. Particularly, the maximal admissible upper bound of the time-varying communication delay can be easily obtained by solving several simple and feasible linear matrix inequalities. Numerical examples are given to demonstrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results