Consensus control of discrete-time multi-agent systems with privacy preservation

Due to the dependence of consensus theory on multi-agent systems (MAS) and the need to openly exchange status information with neighbors on each agent, private status and information are inevitably exposed to the public. In this paper, we present a consensus privacy protection algorithm to solve the consensus privacy problem of second-order MAS. The proposed approach is based on the Paillier algorithm with semi-homomorphic characteristics while combining a distributed control perspective to solve the privacy issues of sharing system status information. Under the conditions of our design, as long as there is at least one trustworthy neighbor node, the privacy of the topology nodes can be protected, and thus, the interconnected nodes are unable to detect the state information of systems from one another. We provide a new method for the privacy of the state information of the discrete-time MAS and use restricted hardware devices to implement the consensus control. Finally, experiments verify the effectiveness of our method, while meeting the actual applicability.