June 25, 2025
I present my work at the 2025 European Control Conference (ECC) in Thessaloniki, Greece.
In my talk, I revisited the classic tool of passivity theory—traditionally used for analyzing undirected networks—and extended it to a class of directed networks known as balanced digraphs. These results offer new insights into achieving stability in nonlinear multi-agent systems with directed interactions, which is an important step toward a broader theory of passivity for directed systems.
Due to the conflict between Israel and Iran, getting to ECC was quite an adventure—I traveled through Jordan, Egypt, and Turkey before finally arriving in Greece. It was a challenging but memorable trip, and I had a lot of fun at the conference.
Title: A Passivity Analysis for Nonlinear Consensus on Balanced Digraphs
Abstract: This work deals with the output consensus problems for multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. While passivity-based approaches are widely used for analyzing undirected consensus protocols, we show that they are generally not applicable to the directed linear consensus protocol. To address this limitation, we propose a general approach that enables a passivity-based analysis for network systems with directed couplings. Then, we mitigate the complexity introduced by nonlinearities and directed interconnections by reformulating the general output consensus problem as a convergence analysis on a submanifold. Within this framework, we further focus on the stabilization problem, a specific form of the output consensus problem, and establish a sufficient passivity-based condition for stabilizing multi-agent systems over balanced digraphs. The results are supported by a numerical example.