Most of the distributed protocols for multi-agent consensus assume that the
agents are mutually cooperative and "trustful," and so the couplings among the
agents bring the values of their states closer. Opinion dynamics in social
groups, however, require beyond these conventional models due to ubiquitous
competition and distrust between some pairs of agents, which are usually
characterized by repulsive couplings and may lead to clustering of the
opinions. A simple yet insightful model of opinion dynamics with both
attractive and repulsive couplings was proposed recently by C. Altafini, who
examined first-order consensus algorithms over static signed graphs. This
protocol establishes modulus consensus, where the opinions become the same in
modulus but may differ in signs. In this paper, we extend the modulus consensus
model to the case where the network topology is an arbitrary time-varying
signed graph and prove reaching modulus consensus under mild sufficient
conditions of uniform connectivity of the graph. For cut-balanced graphs, not
only sufficient, but also necessary conditions for modulus consensus are given.Comment: scheduled for publication in IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control,
2016, vol. 61, no. 7 (accepted in August 2015