A travelling wave approach to a multi-agent system with a path-graph topology

The paper presents a novel approach for the analysis and control of a multi-agent system with non-identical agents and a pathgraph topology. With the help of irrational wave transfer functions, the approach describes the interaction among the agents from the ‘local’ perspective and identify the travelling waves in the multi-agent system. The local treatment of the multi-agent system is complementary to the traditional ‘overall’ approach. It is shown that the dierent dynamics of the agents creates a virtual boundary that causes a partial reflection of the travelling waves. Undesired eects due to the reflection of the waves, such as amplification/attenuation, long transient or string instability, can be compensated by the feedback controllers introduced in this paper. A set of functions in MATLAB, which allows numerical simulation of the proposed approach, have been made available on MATLAB Central.