Resilient distributed vector consensus using centerpoint

• DOI: 10.1016/j.automatica.2021.110046
• Publication Date: 2021-11-24T11:04:53Z
• Authors: Waseem Abbas; Mudassir Shabbir; Jiani Li; Xenofon Koutsoukos
• Keywords: 0209 industrial biotechnology; FOS: Electrical engineering, electronic engineering, information engineering; 02 engineering and technology; Systems and Control (eess.SY); 0102 computer and information sciences; Electrical Engineering and Systems Science - Systems and Control; 01 natural sciences

In this paper, we study the resilient vector consensus problem in networks with adversarial agents and improve resilience guarantees of existing algorithms. A common approach to achieving resilient vector consensus is that every non-adversarial (or normal) agent in the network updates its state by moving towards a point in the convex hull of its \emph{normal} neighbors' states. Since an agent cannot distinguish between its normal and adversarial neighbors, computing such a point, often called as \emph{safe point}, is a challenging task. To compute a safe point, we propose to use the notion of \emph{centerpoint}, which is an extension of the median in higher dimensions, instead of Tverberg partition of points, which is often used for this purpose. We discuss that the notion of centerpoint provides a complete characterization of safe points in $\mathbb{R}^d$. In particular, we show that a safe point is essentially an interior centerpoint if the number of adversaries in the neighborhood of a normal agent $i$ is less than $\frac{N_i}{d+1} $, where $d$ is the dimension of the state vector and $N_i$ is the total number of agents in the neighborhood of $i$. Consequently, we obtain necessary and sufficient conditions on the number of adversarial agents to guarantee resilient vector consensus. Further, by considering the complexity of computing centerpoints, we discuss improvements in the resilience guarantees of vector consensus algorithms and compare with the other existing approaches. Finally, we numerically evaluate the performance of our approach through experiments.