Continuous distributed algorithms for solving linear equations in finite time

This paper studies the distributed algorithms to obtain a solution of the linear equation Ax=b in finite time (FT) over a multi-agent network. In order to guarantee the settling time without depending on the initial states, the fixed-time (FxT) distributed algorithms are also provided to obtain a solution within a globally bounded time. Specifically, three distributed nonlinear algorithms are developed. The first one is designed to achieve FT/FxT consensus on a solution with special initialization. The second is to obtain the solution in FT/FxT with free initialization by first driving the local states to satisfy the special initialization in FT/FxT time. The last one is to guarantee the FT/FxT convergence to a solution closest to specific points when multiple solutions exist. Finally, three case studies are performed to show the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.