A new approach to the stability analysis of continuous-time distributed consensus algorithms

In this letter, we propose a new approach for the stability analysis of distributed continuous-time consensus algorithms in directed networks with time-dependent communication patterns. Instead of using a continuous-time Lyapunov function, we show how to analyze such a continuous-time algorithm by converting it to a discrete-time model. By using this method, we obtain a more general convergence result than existing ones. An example with numerical simulation is also provided to illustrate the theoretical results.