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

Abstract: The paper presents a novel approach for the analysis and control of a multi-agent system with non-identical agents and a path-graph topology. With the help of irrational wave transfer functions, the approach describes the interaction among the agents from the `local' perspective and identifies travelling waves in the system. It is shown that different dynamics of the agents creates a virtual boundary that causes a partial reflection of the travelling waves. Undesired effects due to the reflection of the waves, such as amplification/attenuation, long transients or string instability, can be compensated by the feedback controllers introduced in this paper. We show that the controllers achieve asymptotic and even string stability of the system.