Distributed event‐triggered tracking consensus control for privacy preservation in multi‐agent systems with denial‐of‐service attacks

Summary This article investigates the distributed tracking consensus control problem based on event‐triggered strategy for privacy preservation in nonlinear multi‐agent systems which suffer from denial‐of‐service (DoS) attacks. To address the insecurity of information exposure in the distributed control strategy, the method of privacy preservation for initial information is developed by relying on output maps as masks. Due to the existence of nonlinear dynamics, the neural networks are introduced to deal with unknown nonlinear functions. Then, an event‐triggered communication strategy based on the exponential time‐varying vector is provided to regulate the information transmission under the situation of DoS attacks. Subsequently, combining the proposed event‐triggered strategy, an asynchronous update control scheme is structured to reduce the effect of DoS attacks. It is demonstrated that the tracking consensus can be achieved by utilizing the Lyapunov function and the induction method. Finally, the feasibility of the proposed control method is demonstrated by a simulation example.