Event-Triggered Impulsive Control for Multi-Agent Systems with Actuation Delays under Sequential Channel Attacks

This paper studies secure consensus of nonlinear multi-agent systems (MASs) affected by sequential scaling attacks and communication delays, employing an event-triggered delayed impulsive control strategy. Specifically, it considers sequential scaling attacks occurring within the communication channels between agents, while the communication delays arise in the controller-actuator pair. First, the attack properties include attack duration and attack frequency are defined. Then, a delayed impulsive control protocol that depends exclusively on neighboring agents’ state at event-triggered time instant is proposed to eliminate continuous control behavior. A sampled-data-based event-triggered mechanism (ETM) is introduced that uses the Lyapunov function at impulse time instant to determine communication intervals between agents, effectively reducing the need for continuous event detection. Furthermore, sufficient conditions for secure consensus of MASs are established, along with guidelines for designing event-triggering parameters. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed approach is demonstrated via two numerical simulations.