Flocking and Consensus

This scheme is described and analyzed in:

J. N. Tsitsiklis, "Problems in Decentralized Decision Making and Computation," (13 Mb) Ph.D. Thesis, Department of EECS, MIT, November 1984; technical report LIDS-TH-1424, Laboratory for Information and Decision Systems, MIT.

J. N. Tsitsiklis, D. P. Bertsekas and M. Athans, "Distributed Asynchronous Deterministic and Stochastic Gradient Optimization Algorithms," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 31, No. 9, 1986, pp. 803-812.

D.P. Bertsekas and J.N. Tsitsiklis, Parallel and Distributed Computation: Numerical Methods, Prentice Hall, 1989; republished by Athena Scientific, 1997.

For an overview of convergence results and some extensions, see:

V. D. Blondel, J. M. Hendrickx, A. Olshevsky, and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "Convergence in Multiagent Coordination, Consensus, and Flocking," in Proceedings of the Joint 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and European Control Conference (CDC-ECC'05), Seville, Spain, December 2005.

D. P. Bertsekas and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "Comment on `Coordination of Groups of Mobile Autonomous Agents Using Nearest Neighbor Rules'," IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, Vol. 52, No. 5, May 2007, pp. 968-969.

A. Olshevsky and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "On the Nonexistence of Quadratic Lyapunov Functions for Consensus Algorithms", June 2007; revised March 2008; IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, forthcoming.

A. Olshevsky and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "Convergence Speed in Distributed Consensus and Averaging", December 2006; SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, in press.

A. Nedic, A. Olshevsky, A. Ozdaglar, and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "On Distributed Averaging Algorithms and Quantization Effects," submitted, November 2007.

V. D. Blondel, J. M. Hendrickx, and J. N. Tsitsiklis, "On Krause's consensus formation model with state-dependent connectivity," submitted, July 2008.