Multi-Agent Event-Triggered LQG Control under Shared Communication Constraints

Abstract

This letter studies event-triggered linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) control for multi-agent systems sharing a communication network with limited per-step capacity. Although the agent dynamics are decoupled, the communication decisions are coupled through the shared network constraint, leading to a constrained multi-agent scheduling problem. We show that the optimal control law remains certainty-equivalent and decouples across agents through independent finite-horizon Riccati recursions, whereas the transmission schedule remains globally coupled. Based on this structure, we develop a centralized receding-horizon scheduling framework and reformulate the resulting problem as a mixed-integer linear program (MILP) using a closed-form characterization of the estimation-error covariance. To improve scalability, we derive a window-based skip-pruning condition that safely fixes consecutive transmission decisions to zero before solving the MILP, and we propose an auction-inspired scheduler based on one-step transmission-benefit scores. Numerical results show that the proposed model predictive control (MPC) scheduler achieves the best trade-off between control performance and communication cost, while the auction-based scheduler attains performance close to MPC with substantially lower computational complexity.