On Stability and Consensus of Signed Networks: A Self-loop Compensation Perspective

Positive semidefinite is not an inherent property of signed Laplacians, which renders the stability and consensus of multi-agent system on undirected signed networks intricate. Inspired by the correlation between diagonal dominance and spectrum of signed Laplacians, this paper proposes a self-loop compensation mechanism in the design of interaction protocol amongst agents and examines the stability/consensus of the compensated signed networks. It turns out that self-loop compensation acts as exerting a virtual leader on these agents that are incident to negative edges, steering whom towards origin. Analytical connections between self-loop compensation and the collective behavior of the compensated signed network are established. Necessary and/or sufficient conditions for predictable cluster consensus of signed networks via self-loop compensation are provided. The optimality of self-loop compensation is discussed. Furthermore, we extend our results to directed signed networks where the symmetry of signed Laplacian is not free. Simulation examples are provided to demonstrate the theoretical results.