Output formation-containment of coupled heterogeneous linear systems under intermittent communication

- Output formation-containment problem is discussed for heterogeneous systems.
- Intermittent communication controllers are designed for leaders and followers.
- A systematic four-step controller design procedure is concluded.
- An optimization problem is formulated for decreasing the communication burden.
- A heuristic algorithm is developed to obtain the optimized communication ratio.

This paper investigates the output formation-containment problem of the coupled heterogeneous linear systems under intermittent communication. The systems considered in this paper are more general in the sense that each system, whether a leader or a follower, has different dimension and different dynamic. Besides, each system only communicates with its neighbors intermittently. Based on the intermittent information, both the state-feedback and the output-feedback distributed control protocols are designed and a criterion is derived to calculate the lower bound of the communication ratio. Furthermore, a heuristic algorithm based on the Fireworks Algorithm is developed to obtain an optimized communication ratio, which greatly reduces the communication burden. Finally, numerical examples are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.