Distributed Finite-Time Consensus Control of Second-Order Multiagent Systems Subject to Communication Time Delay

This paper studies the consensus problem of a second-order multiagent system (MAS) with fixed communication delay under the structure of leaderless and leader-following systems. By using graph theory and finite-time control scheme, a distributed control protocol is proposed for each agent to reach consensus in a finite time. In practical application, the time delay of states is unavoidable, and for this, the consensus method is supposed to be extended to solve the time-delay problem. Thus, a finite-time consensus protocol with communication time delay is proposed in this paper. Compared with the general consensus method, the reliability and convergence speed of the system are increased by using the finite-time control. In addition, the protocol is distributed, and all agents have only local interactions. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed protocol is verified by two numerical simulations.

Development and Simulation of Motion Control System for Small Satellites Formation

In the paper, the problem of forming and maintaining the small satellites formation in the near-earth projected circular orbits is considered. The satellite formation reconfiguration and formation-keeping control laws are proposed by employing the passivity-based output feedback control. For the complete nonlinear and time-dependent dynamics of the relative motion of a pair of satellites in elliptical orbits, new combined control algorithms, including a consensus protocol, are proposed and analyzed. A comparison of the control modes using the passivity-based output feedback control and the proportional-differential controller with and without the consensus algorithm is given. On the basis of the passification method, the algorithm is obtained ensuring the stable motion of the slave satellite relative to the orbit of the master satellite. To improve the accuracy of the satellites’ positioning, a consensus protocol based on measurements of the relative positions of the satellites is proposed and studied. Computer simulations of the proposed algorithms for options to construct formations are provided for two projected circular orbits of 8 satellites, demonstrating the efficiency of the proposed control schemes. It is shown that the resulting passivity-based output feedback control provides better accuracy than the PD controller. It is also shown that the use of the consensus protocol further increases the positioning accuracy of the satellite constellation.

A novel Confidential Consortium Blockchain framework for peer to peer energy trading

The vital dependence of peer to peer (P2P) energy trading frameworks on creative Internet of Things (IoT) has been making it more vulnerable against a wide scope of attacks and performance bottlenecks like low throughput, high latency, high CPU, memory use, etc. This hence compromises the energy exchanging information to store, share, oversee, and access. Blockchain innovation as a feasible solution, works with the rule of untrusted members. To alleviate this threat and performance issues, this paper presents a Blockchain based Confidential Consortium (CoCo) P2P energy trading system that works on the trust issues among the energy exchanging networks and limits performance parameters. It reduces the duplicate validation by creating a trusted network on nodes, where participants identities are known and controlled. A Java-script-based smart contract is sent over the Microsoft CoCo system with Proof of Elapsed Time (PoET) consensus protocol. Also, a functional model is designed for the proposed framework and the performance bench-marking has been done considering about latency, throughput, transaction rate control, success and fail transaction, CPU and memory usage, network traffic. Additionally, it is shown that PoET’s performance is superior to proof of work (PoW) for multi-hosting conditions. The measured throughput and latency moving toward database speeds with more flexible, business-specific confidentiality models, network policy management through distributed governance, support for non-deterministic transactions, and reduced energy consumption.

Privacy preserving divisible double auction with a hybridized TEE-blockchain system

Double auction mechanisms have been designed to trade a variety of divisible resources (e.g., electricity, mobile data, and cloud resources) among distributed agents. In such divisible double auction, all the agents (both buyers and sellers) are expected to submit their bid profiles, and dynamically achieve the best responses. In practice, these agents may not trust each other without a market mediator. Fortunately, smart contract is extensively used to ensure digital agreement among mutually distrustful agents. The consensus protocol helps the smart contract execution on the blockchain to ensure strong integrity and availability. However, severe privacy risks would emerge in the divisible double auction since all the agents should disclose their sensitive data such as the bid profiles (i.e., bid amount and prices in different iterations) to other agents for resource allocation and such data are replicated on all the nodes in the network. Furthermore, the consensus requirements will bring a huge burden for the blockchain, which impacts the overall performance. To address these concerns, we propose a hybridized TEE-Blockchain system (system and auction mechanism co-design) to privately execute the divisible double auction. The designed hybridized system ensures privacy, honesty and high efficiency among distributed agents. The bid profiles are sealed for optimally allocating divisible resources while ensuring truthfulness with a Nash Equilibrium. Finally, we conduct experiments and empirical studies to validate the system and auction performance using two real-world applications.

The Study of Usage of Hyperledger Fabric in Agricultural Ecommerce

With the advent of COVID-19, the ecommerce industry in India has seen an inflection point with rise in the demand across all the segments of the industry. Much ecommerce has been started to cater to the supply and demand mismatch in agricultural goods front. In these times, Blockchain is seen to create a trust bridge for all the stakeholder to transact through goods and supplies with minimal risks involved. But, to use this technology the technical, economical and a scalable approach to this technology is still a very prominent requirement for mass adoption. Permissionless Blockchain build on Proof of Work consensus protocol cannot be used due to their slow speed, low scalability, and high energy consumption for network functioning. This paper concludes with the possibility of using a Permissioned blockchain such as Hyperledger Fabric to not only solve the several underlying issues to facilitate efficiency in the Ecommerce architecture, with critical view on the mass adoption.