A survey of the consensus for multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MASs) has developed into an emerging complex system science and gradually infiltrated into various fields of social life. The problem of consensus (i.e. all agents eventually to reach an agreement upon a common quantity of interest) is the basis of distributed coordinated control of the MASs, which has attracted tremendous attention from both theoretical and practical perspectives. This paper comprehensively reviews the state-of-the-art development in the consensus of MASs. Firstly, the basic framework and overview of MASs and consensus are discussed. Secondly, the motivations, results and methods of several kinds of consensus problems are introduced, including consensus subjected to communication constraints, leader-following consensus, group consensus, consensus based on trigger mechanism, finite-time consensus, multi-consensus and multi-tracking. Finally, some challenging issues and development trends of the consensus of MASs are considered.