Bipartite Consensus of Opinion Dynamics Through Delivering Credible Information

Abstract

The consensus behavior of a new opinion dynamics with cooperative-antagonistic relation is studied in this article, which considers each agent delivering credible information to his/her neighbors. The information delivery between agents is unidirectional but not persistent. In particular, each agent is assigned with a confidence interval such that his/her opinion only therein is credible. By delivering the opinion projection onto his/her confidence interval of each agent, an opinion dynamics over a signed switching directed graph is first proposed. Next, by imposing nonempty intersection assumptions on the confidence intervals, it is shown that the bipartite consensus of the proposed opinion dynamics is achieved, given that the underlying switching graph is uniformly jointly strongly connected, and its total graph is structurally balanced. Also, the consensus opinions are shown to be located within all the confidence intervals. This indicates that the ultimate opinions of all the agents are credible. An example is simulated to verify the proposed main results.