Cucker-Smale Flocking Behavior for Multiagent Networks With Coopetition Interactions and Communication Delays

Flocking aims to drive a group of agents connecting with each other to interact in a complex way, thereby emerging the behavior of group aggregation. Owing to the prevalence and complexity of cooperation and competition relationships among agents, it is practical and challenging to explore the realization of flocking behavior on multiagent coopetition networks. With that in mind, this article focuses on the study of flocking behavior for Cucker-Smale multiagent model over coopetition networks with communication delays. In this model, the cooperation/competition degree between agents is portrayed as a weight function with respect to communication distance, e.g., the closer (farther) the communication distance, the stronger (weaker) the cooperation/competition degree. With the help of analysis tools consisting of edge composites and substochastic matrices, the algebraic relationships between cooperation and competition degrees are established to ensure the emergence of flocking behavior. Moreover, mathematical expressions are given to show the effect of different communication delays on the agents’ final aggregation upper bound and convergence rate. In the end, the theoretical results are validated through computer simulations.