Identifying Disconnected Agents in Multiagent Systems via External Estimators

This article addresses the problem of identifying disconnected agents in multiagent systems via external estimators. Specifically, we employ external estimators with an appropriately designed decision rule to identify the disconnectedness (i.e., the status of being disconnected) between two arbitrarily chosen agents in formation-control multiagent systems. The design of the decision rule is inspired by the unit-root testing problem of autoregressive time series. To make the best possible decision, a best-effort procedure is also proposed. Then, by introducing the concept of connected components (or just components) in graph theory, and using the methods of consensus analysis and time-series analysis, we develop an analytical framework to show the theoretical performance of the designed decision rule. A particularly important result shown by our analysis is that the miss probability of the decision rule can converge to 0 as the number of data samples increases. Finally, simulation results validate the performance of the decision rule and the best-effort procedure, showing that they can perform well even in small samples.