Antagonistic consensus analysis in time-varying balanced networks

Antagonistic behavior represents one of the most instinct and complex features of certain multi-agent system (MAS). How to steer such unreceptive agents to reach consensus remains an interesting and challenging topic for research of social and biological networks. The underlying problem is further complicated when the system involves both time-varying topologies and communication delays in network interaction. In this paper, the consensus problem of second-order multi-agent systems with time-varying delays and dynamically changing topologies is studied in antagonistic balanced network. A consensus protocol using only local (neighboring) information with nonuniform time-delays is developed to drive the antagonistically grouped agents to a common target. A sufficient condition is established for the proposed strategy to ensure the existence of the solution for the antagonistic consensus problem under non-identically varying time-delays and non-rigidly connected communication topologies. A numerical example is provided to illustrate the significance and novelty of the results.