Connecting Disconnected Agents in Multiagent Systems via Federated Control

This study develops a control technique, called federated control, to connect disconnected agents in multiagent systems aided by control stations. Specifically, we first use a federated architecture to model multiagent systems with control stations. Based on this architecture, a federated-control procedure is proposed for the task of connecting disconnected agents, together with an initialization procedure. Then, how the federated-control procedure connects disconnected agents by incorporating simple global coordination (i.e., global averaging) is analyzed. We derive the close-form expression of the time sufficient to connect disconnected agents, which possesses interesting properties including early computability and delay independence. The convergence of the formation of multiagent systems and the velocities of all agents can also be proved.