On Bifurcations in Nonlinear Consensus Networks

The theory of consensus dynamics is widely employed to study various linear behaviors in networked control systems. Moreover, nonlinear phenomena have been observed in animal groups, power networks and in other networked systems. These observations inspire the development in this paper of three novel approaches to define distributed nonlinear dynamical interactions. The resulting dynamical systems are akin to higher-order nonlinear consensus systems. Over connected undirected graphs, the resulting dynamical systems exhibit various interesting behaviors that we rigorously characterize.