A review of event-triggered consensus control in multi-agent systems

Event-triggered control (ETC) of multi-agent systems (MASs) has been extensively investigated due to its advantages in conserving communication resources and reducing control frequency. This paper provides a systematic review of ETC in MASs from three perspectives. First, the primary motivation for ETC mechanisms is to minimise resource consumption. We summarise recent researches that focus on improving ETC schemes of MASs to reduce resource consumption. Second, excluding Zeno behaviour is crucial in the design of ETC for MASs. Three methods of excluding Zeno behaviour are summarised for various event-triggered forms. Last, due to the importance of stabilisation time as a performance metric in evaluating control algorithms, research on finite-time ETC of MASs is a recent and ongoing topic. We summarise recent studies on finite-time event-triggered consensus, fixed-time event-triggered consensus and prescribed-time event-triggered consensus, and analyse the advantages and disadvantages of each control scheme through simulation experiments.