Distributed Node-to-Node State Consensus in Two-Layer Multi-agent Systems with Switching Topologies

Focusing on two-layer multi-agent systems affected by malicious network attacks that trigger topology switching, this work investigates the problem of distributed node-to-node consensus control. Unlike the majority of existing research that presumes a static communication topology for the follower layer, this work examines a more demanding scenario in which the follower-layer topology changes over time and might temporarily lose connectivity due to cyberattacks. A new distributed control protocol is put forward, and on this basis, adequate criteria for realizing practical node-to-node consensus are deduced, a result that guarantees consensus tracking errors will be confined to a bounded range. A set of multiple Lyapunov functions are established to assess system stability during both regular operation and attack time slots. Moreover, specific limits on the attack duration within each cycle are presented. To validate the performance of the proposed control protocol, a simulation case is implemented in the final section.