Consensus of Switched Nonlinear Multiagent Systems Subject to Cyber Attacks

In this article, the output consensus problem is investigated for a class of switched nonlinear multiagent systems, where denial-of-service attacks and faults are considered in communication channels and agents’ actuators, respectively. The cyber attacks can damage the communication channels, which will cause the consensus performance degradation or even failure to achieve consensus. Compared with the existing results on consensus of multiagent systems under cyber attacks, the agents’ dynamics in this article are described by higher order heterogeneous switched nonlinear systems. The cyber attacks, actuator faults, asynchronous switchings, and the high complexity of the system make the existing consensus algorithms ineffective. A novel control scheme for the output consensus of the multiagent system subject to cyber attacks is proposed. By the graph theory, switched system theory and Lyapunov function method, sufficient conditions are presented to check whether the consensus objective can be achieved. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed scheme is illustrated by two numerical simulations.