Collaborative Safety-Critical Control for Dynamically Coupled Networked Systems

Abstract: As modern systems become ever more connected with complex dynamic coupling relationships, developing safe control methods becomes paramount. In this paper, we discuss the relationship of node-level safety definitions for individual agents with local neighborhood dynamics. We define a collaborative control barrier function (CCBF) and provide conditions under which sets defined by these functions will be forward invariant. We use collaborative node-level control barrier functions to construct a novel \edit{decentralized} algorithm for the safe control of collaborating network agents and provide conditions under which the algorithm is guaranteed to converge to a viable set of safe control actions for all agents. We illustrate these results on a networked susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model.