Forced Consensus of Multi-Agent Systems with Directed Communication Topology and Interval Time-Varying Delay

This paper is concernedwith forced consensus problem for directed multi-agent systems with intervaltime-varying delay, whereall agents approach a constant reference trajectory under the condition thatonly a subset of the agents can receive information from the reference state. Thetime-varying delay is assumed to belong to an interval with known lower andupper bounds, but its lower bound may be greater than zero. We first propose a consensusalgorithm that extends the existing results in the literature to account forinterval time-varying delay. Then, the consensus stability analysis isconducted by introducing an appropriate Lyapunov-Krasovskii functional and using Jensen inequalitytechnique. A delay-range-dependentstability criterion is derived in terms of linear matrixinequalities, which can be efficiently solved by the interior-point algorithm.Finally, simulation examples indicatethe capabilities of the proposed algorithm.