A strategy to accelerate consensus in leader-follower networks

In this paper we present a new strategy to accelerate convergence in consensus networks. We consider a multi-agent system with a fixed communication structure: each agent updates its state value based on the states of the neighbouring agents, with the common goal of achieving consensus. In this set-up, we select pleaders among the agents whose task is to accelerate the convergence speed, by exchanging information among each other and by elaborating an additional control signal, based only on the state evolution of the p leaders. We first provide a complete description of the system, then investigate under what conditions we can freely allocate the overall system dynamics, and finally address the main objective: accelerating the consensus speed.