Encryption–decryption‐based event‐triggered consensus control for nonlinear MASs under DoS attacks

Abstract In this article, the consensus tracking problem is discussed for a class of discrete‐time nonlinear multi‐agent systems (MASs) subject to denial‐of‐service (DoS) attacks. The individual agents interact with each other via communication network whose topology is assumed to be time‐varying and strongly connected. Two techniques are employed to deal with the network‐induced complexities. On one hand, an event‐triggering scheme is adopted to regulate the data transmission among agents with the purpose of making full utilization of the limited communication resources; and on the other hand, an encryption–decryption mechanism is designed with the aim to provide compensation, thereby mitigating the DoS attack effects. It is the objective of the addressed problem to develop a distributed model‐free adaptive control law to enforce the MASs achieve desirable consensus performance. By using a specific projection algorithm in combination with a dynamic linearization method, the desired control protocol is formulated explicitly, whose effectiveness and applicability are demonstrated via an illustrative numerical example.