How improving performance may imply losing consistency in event-triggered consensus

Abstract: Event-triggered control is often argued to lower the average triggering rate compared to time-triggered control while still achieving a desired control goal, e.g., the same performance level. However, this property, often called consistency, cannot be taken for granted and can be hard to analyze in many settings. In particular, although numerous decentralized event-triggered control schemes have been proposed in the past years, their performance properties with respect to time-triggered control remain mostly unexplored. In this paper, we therefore examine the performance properties of event-triggered control (relative to time-triggered control) for a single-integrator consensus problem with a level-triggering rule. We consider the long-term average quadratic deviation from consensus as a performance measure. For this setting, we show that enriching the information the local controllers use improves the performance of the consensus algorithm but renders a previously consistent event-triggered control scheme inconsistent. In addition, we do so while deploying optimal control inputs which we derive for both information cases and all triggering schemes. With this insight, we can furthermore explain the relationship between two contrasting consistency results from the literature on decentralized event-triggered control. We support our theoretical findings with simulation results.