Assistant professor Rasoul Etesami of the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, USA, has visited CDSL last month. He delivered a seminar under the title of “Duality and Stability in Multiagent State-Dependent Network Dynamics”.
Prof. Etesami introduced a new framework to analyze the stability of multi-agent systems with state-dependent dynamics, where time-varying networks and states of the agents are highly coupled. Such systems include HK dynamics, where each agent takes the arithmetic mean of its neighbors and moves to that location at the next time step.
In this framework, prof. Etesami presented a theorem that suggests an explicit Lyapunov function of the state-dependent network dynamics under certain conditions. Since CDSL has consistently been researching on multi-agent systems, devising the blended dynamics approach in particular, there were several questions and in-depth discussions after the seminar. We hope that CDSL students and other seminar attendees are motivated by this seminar and develop further ideas on analyzing multi-agent systems.