English

The robustness of democratic consensus

Systems and Control 2015-02-17 v1 Multiagent Systems Optimization and Control Probability

Abstract

In linear models of consensus dynamics, the state of the various agents converges to a value which is a convex combination of the agents' initial states. We call it democratic if in the large scale limit (number of agents going to infinity) the vector of convex weights converges to 0 uniformly. Democracy is a relevant property which naturally shows up when we deal with opinion dynamic models and cooperative algorithms such as consensus over a network: it says that each agent's measure/opinion is going to play a negligeable role in the asymptotic behavior of the global system. It can be seen as a relaxation of average consensus, where all agents have exactly the same weight in the final value, which becomes negligible for a large number of agents.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1502.04264,
  title  = {The robustness of democratic consensus},
  author = {Fabio Fagnani and Jean-Charles Delvenne},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1502.04264},
  year   = {2015}
}

Comments

13 pages, 2 figs

R2 v1 2026-06-22T08:29:45.971Z