Where To Go and How To Go: a Theoretical Study of Different Leader Roles in Networked Systems

This letter studies synchronization conditions for distributed dynamic networks with different types of leaders. The role of a leader specifying a desired global state trajectory through local interactions (the power leader) has long been recognized and modeled. This paper introduces the complementary notion of a knowledge leader holding information on the target dynamics, which is propagated to the entire network through local adaptation mechanisms. Knowledge-based leader-followers networks have many analogs in biology, e.g., in evolutionary processes and disease propagation. Different types of leaders can co-exist in the same network.