Collaborative Safety-Critical Control in Coupled Networked Systems

As modern systems become increasingly connected with complex dynamic coupling relationships, developing safe control methods for such interconnected systems becomes paramount. In this paper, we explore the relationship of node-level safety definitions for individual agents to local neighborhood dynamics. We define a collaborative control barrier function and provide conditions under which sets defined by these functions will be forward invariant. We use collaborative control barrier functions to construct a novel decentralized algorithm for the safe control of collaborating network agents and provide conditions under which the algorithm is guaranteed to return a viable set of safe control actions for all agents. We then illustrate these results on a networked susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model.