Differentially Private Mean-Square Output Consensus for Heterogeneous Multiagent Systems: An Asynchronous Sampled-Data Interactions Scheme

This article investigates the problem of privacy-preserving average consensus for continuous-time heterogeneous multiagent systems with intermittent information transfer under asynchronous sampled-data interactions. To address the challenges posed by agent-specific asynchronous sampled-data and time-varying communication delays, a time-translation approach incorporating a shared sampling period strategy is introduced, effectively transforming the asynchronous problem into a synchronous framework. Next, integrated distributed hybrid controller with time-varying noise injection is designed, enabling agents to interact with sensitive information only at sampling instants, thereby preserving privacy while maintaining trajectory availability. Then, the time-varying step-size and noise parameters, which are tunable parameters of the dual control mechanism corresponding to the desired ε-differential privacy budget and system convergence accuracy are proposed, and the trade-off between control performance and privacy preservation is thoroughly analyzed. It is shown that the proposed protocol achieves asymptotically unbiased mean-square output consensus with predefined accuracy and privacy budget. Numerical examples validate the theoretical results.