Information consensus of asynchronous discrete-time multi-agent systems

This paper studies the consensus problem of multi-agent systems in an asynchronous framework. Under certain assumptions, the consensus protocol leads to stable behaviors even if the updating instants and sets of the agents are asynchronously determined. The model of asynchronous multi-agent systems encompasses those synchronous ones with various communication patterns, i.e., issues of directional, delayed, or failed communication can be addressed in the same framework. The asynchronous results in this paper thus shed new light on the synchronous results reported in the literature. In particular, synchronous protocols under dynamically changing interaction topologies can be seen as a special case of the asynchronous protocol where all communication delays are zero.