Impulsive secure consensus control of nonlinear multi-agent systems with actuation delays under sequential scaling attacks

This paper investigates the mean-square exponential consensus problem of nonlinear multi-agent systems in the presence of actuation delays under sequential scaling attacks. Given the limited energy of the attacker, specific attack characteristics such as attack duration and attack frequency are introduced to characterise the sequential scaling attacks. Firstly, an event-triggering mechanism is proposed to reduce the communication resource consumption by determining when agents need to communicate with their neighbours, thereby avoiding continuous information transmission. Considering the effect of actuation delays, a distributed delayed impulsive controller is designed. An impulse-switching error system is then constructed, which transforms the original system with time delays into one without. Furthermore, sufficient consensus criteria is derived, imposing constraints on event-triggering parameters. The design of impulsive gain matrix is also presented. Finally, the obtained results are demonstrated to be effective through an example.