Distributed Optimal Resource Allocation Search: A Dynamic Event-Triggered Algorithm

This paper investigates an equality-coupled distributed resource allocation problem with smooth general convex local objective functions. A discrete-time residual-aware dynamic event-triggered algorithm is proposed over time-varying switching undirected graphs. Unlike existing event-triggered resource allocation algorithms that rely on strong convexity, the proposed method establishes convergence for general convex costs without using strong monotonicity or contraction arguments. The key idea is to co-design a resource-allocation search recursion with a dynamic triggering rule that incorporates both local gradient-estimation errors and local gradient-disagreement residuals. The resulting triggering mechanism reduces unnecessary communication and generates a summable error bound, which is embedded into a Mirror-EXTRA-type Lyapunov analysis. Under suitable step-size conditions, the proposed algorithm is proved to converge to an optimal solution. Further, when the local objective functions are strongly convex, a linear convergence result is established. Numerical simulations and comparative tests with related event-triggered methods verify the effectiveness and communication efficiency of the proposed algorithm.