Cascading Waves of Fluctuation in Time-delay Multi-agent Rendezvous

Abstract: We develop a framework to assess the risk of cascading failures when a team of agents aims to rendezvous in time in the presence of exogenous noise and communication time-delay. The notion of value-at-risk (VaR) measure is used to evaluate the risk of cascading failures (i.e., waves of large fluctuations) when agents have failed to rendezvous. Furthermore, an efficient explicit formula is obtained to calculate the risk of higher-order cascading failures recursively. Finally, from a risk-aware design perspective, we report an evaluation of the most vulnerable sequence of agents in various communication graphs.