Bipartite Consensus in the Presence of Denial of Service Adversary

Abstract: Attacks on a set of agents with cooperative and antagonistic interactions attempting to achieve linear bipartite consensus are considered here. In bipartite consensus, two clusters are formed, agents in each cluster converging to a final state which is negative of the other cluster's final state. The adversary seeks to slow down the bipartite consensus by a Denial of Service (DoS) type attack where the attacker has the capability to break a specific number of links at each time instant. The problem is formulated as an optimal control problem and the optimal strategy for the adversary is determined.