Structural sign herdability of linear time-invariant systems:theory and design for arbitrary network structures

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to investigate graph-theoretic conditions for structural herdability of an LTI system. In particular, we are interested in the structural sign (SS) herdability of a system wherein the underlying digraph representing it is signed. Structural herdability finds applications in various domains like power networks, biological networks, opinion dynamics, multi-robot shepherding, etc. We begin the analysis by introducing a layered graph representation Gs of the signed digraph G; such a representation allows us to capture the signed distances between the nodes with ease. We construct a subgraph of G_s that characterizes paths of identical signs between layers and uniform path lengths, referred to as a layer-wise unisigned graph LUG(G_s). A special subgraph of an LUG(G_s), denoted as an LUG^H(G_s), is key to achieving SS herdability. This is because we prove that an LTI system is SS herdable if and only if there exists an LUG^H(G_s) which covers all the nodes of the given digraph. To the best of our knowledge, such a graphical test is one of the first methods which allows us to check SS herdability for arbitrary digraph topologies. Interestingly, the analysis also reveals that a system can be SS herdable even in the presence of (signed and layer) dilation in the associated digraph (note that such a behaviour has been shown to be impossible in directed trees). Additionally, we also extend these results to digraphs with multiple leader and driver nodes. In order to illustrate all the results, we present numerous examples throughout the paper.