On Laplacian Spectra of Parametric Families of Closely Connected Networks with Application to Cooperative Control

In this paper, we introduce mathematical models for studying a supernetwork that is comprised of closely connected groups of subnetworks. For several related classes of such supernetworks, we explicitly derive an analytical representation of their Laplacian spectra. This work is motivated by an application of spectral graph theory in cooperative control of multi-agent networked systems. Specifically, we apply our graph-theoretic results to establish bounds on the speed of convergence and the communication time-delay for solving the average-consensus problem by a supernetwork of clusters of integrator agents.