This paper is concerned with event-triggered consensus of general linear multiagent systems (MASs) in leaderless and leader-following networks, respectively, in the framework of adaptive control. A distributed dynamic event-triggered strategy is first proposed, in which an auxiliary parameter is introduced for each agent to regulate its threshold dynamically. The time-varying threshold ensures less triggering instants, compared with the traditional static one. Then under the proposed event-triggered strategy, a distributed adaptive consensus protocol is formed including the updating law of the coupling strength for each agent. Some criteria are derived to guarantee leaderless or leader-following consensus for MASs with general linear dynamics, respectively. Moreover, it is proved that the triggering time sequences do not exhibit Zeno behavior. Finally, the effectiveness of the proposed dynamic event-triggered control mechanism combined with adaptive control is validated by two examples.

Multiagent systems (MASs) provide an effective means for coordinating spatially distributed and networked agents (or nodes, subsystems) such that the desired cooperative tasks can be accomplished with promising reliability, manipulability, scalability, and efficiency. One key issue in the study of MASs is the design of distributed cooperative control protocol and algorithm that depend on only local and real-time information exchanges among interacting agents over networks. However, network-enabled information sharing and increasing connectivity in practical MASs present several attack factors for malicious adversaries, thereby rendering secure control of MASs fundamentally significant. This article provides a brief survey of systems and control technologies that have been available for addressing different secure control problems of MASs in the face of various malicious attacks. First, attacks on MASs are classified based on different configuration layers. Then, the existing attack models and strategies on communication layer and agent layer are systematically examined, respectively. Furthermore, some typical secure control techniques for MASs that have been employed to handle these attacks are surveyed. Finally, several challenging issues are envisioned for potential future research.

This article focuses on the formation control problem of nonlinear multiagent systems under denial-of-service attacks. The formation control can be preserved by the distributed hybrid event-triggering strategies (HETSs). As a balance between periodic and continuous event-triggering strategies, HETS arranges a tradeoff between the resource utilization and the communication frequency among agents. Theoretical results are verified using a benchmark problem of six miniature quadrotor prototypes.

This article presents a secure communication scheme based on the quantized synchronization of master-slave neural networks under an event-triggered strategy. First, a dynamic event-triggered strategy is proposed based on a quantized output feedback, for which a quantized output feedback controller is formed. Second, theoretical criteria are derived to ensure the bounded synchronization of master-slave neural networks. With these criteria, an explicit upper bound is given for the synchronization error. Sufficient conditions are also provided on the existence of quantized output feedback controllers. A Chua's circuit is chosen to illustrate the effectiveness of our theoretical results. Third, a secure communication scheme is presented based on the synchronization of master-slave neural networks by combining the basic principle of cryptology. Then, a secure image communication is studied to verify the feasibility and security performance of the proposed secure communication scheme. The impact of the quantization level and the event-triggered control (ETC) on image decryption is investigated through experiments.