Privacy-Preserving Average Consensus in Multiagent Systems via Partial Information Transmission

This article investigates the privacy-preserving average consensus problem in multiagent systems. A new approach is proposed to achieve the accurate average consensus value while protecting the initial state information of agents. The key idea to achieve these goals is based on partial information transmission. Each agent decomposes its initial state information into several different subinformation. The values of these subinformation are chosen randomly but with their mean value fixed to the original initial value. Then, based on multiple communication channels, agents share all their subinformation, but ensure that each neighbor can only obtain partial subinformation. We prove that the privacy can be protected under our method if each agent has at least two neighbors, and one of the neighbors is neutral. The generalization on the directed graph about this method is also considered. Finally, two examples are provided to illustrate the design process and practical applications of the proposed approach.