Provably Safe Decentralized Contingency MPC under State-Only Information and Limited Sensing for Nonlinear Multi-agent Systems
Abstract
This paper considers decentralized contingency MPC for multi-agent control under a state-only information pattern, with particular focus on limited sensing and plug-and-play operation. The objective is to retain recursive feasibility, safety, and Lyapunov-type convergence while reducing conservatism in local interaction handling. The framework relies on agent-wise fallback regions (safe sets) in which a feasible contingency maneuver to a safe equilibrium is always available. A novel safe-set update mechanism is introduced that supports less conservative decentralized interaction while preserving the underlying guarantees. This, in turn, enables memory-free local interaction and finite sensing ranges without requiring agents to reconstruct the exact neighbor geometry. The resulting scheme remains fully decentralized and preserves the shared-first-input contingency MPC structure. Theoretical guarantees and simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the approach in dense multi-agent scenarios.
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BibTeX
@misc{studt2026provably,
title = {{Provably Safe Decentralized Contingency MPC under State-Only Information and Limited Sensing for Nonlinear Multi-agent Systems}},
author = {Max Studt and Georg Schildbach},
howpublished = {arXiv},
year = {2026},
month = aug,
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2608.30874},
eprint = {2608.30874},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30874},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Provably Safe Decentralized Contingency MPC under State-Only Information and Limited Sensing for Nonlinear Multi-agent Systems
AU - Max Studt
AU - Georg Schildbach
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/08/31
PB - arXiv
DO - 10.48550/arxiv.2608.30874
UR - https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.30874
AB - This paper considers decentralized contingency MPC for multi-agent control under a state-only information pattern, with particular focus on limited sensing and plug-and-play operation. The objective is to retain recursive feasibility, safety, and Lyapunov-type convergence while reducing conservatism in local interaction handling. The framework relies on agent-wise fallback regions (safe sets) in which a feasible contingency maneuver to a safe equilibrium is always available. A novel safe-set update mechanism is introduced that supports less conservative decentralized interaction while preserving the underlying guarantees. This, in turn, enables memory-free local interaction and finite sensing ranges without requiring agents to reconstruct the exact neighbor geometry. The resulting scheme remains fully decentralized and preserves the shared-first-input contingency MPC structure. Theoretical guarantees and simulation results illustrate the effectiveness of the approach in dense multi-agent scenarios.
ER -