Decentralized design of consensus protocols with minimal communication links based on directed spanning tree

This paper proposes a decentralized design approach of consensus protocols of multi-agent systems (MASs) via a directed-spanning-tree(DST)-based linear transformation and the corresponding minimal communication links. First, the consensus problem of multi-agent systems is transformed into the decentralized output stabilization problem by constructing a linear transformation based on a DST of the communication topology, and thus a necessary and sufficient consensus criterion in terms of decentralized fixed mode (DFM) is derived. Next, a new distributed protocol is designed by using only the neighbors' information on the DST, which is a fully decentralized design approach. Finally, some numerical examples are given to verify the results attained.