Ultrafast consensus via predictive mechanisms

¹  Department of Control Science and Engineering, Huazhong University of Science and Technology Wuhan 430074, PRC
²  Department of Engineering, University of Cambridge - Cambridge CB2 1PZ, UK, EU
³  Department of Engineering, University of Leicester - Leicester LE1 7RH, UK, EU
⁴  Department of Modern Physics, University of Science and Technology of China - Hefei 230026, PRC
⁵  Department of Physics, University of Fribourg, Chemin du Muse - CH-1700 Fribourg, Switzerland

Corresponding author: mc274@le.ac.uk

Received: 30 March 2008
Accepted: 3 July 2008

Abstract

An important natural phenomenon surfaces that ultrafast consensus can be achieved by introducing predictive mechanisms. By predicting the dynamics of a network several steps ahead and using this information in the consensus protocol, it is shown that, without changing the topology of the network, drastic improvements can be achieved in terms of the speed of convergence towards consensus and of the feasible range of sampling periods, compared with the routine consensus protocol. In natural science, this study provides an evidence for the idea that some predictive mechanisms exist in widely-spread biological swarms, flocks, and schools. From the industrial engineering point of view, inclusion of an efficient predictive mechanism allows for a significant increase in the consensus speed and a reduction of the required communication energy.