Leader-follower strategy via a sliding mode approach

In this paper, the decision making problem in continuous-time dynamic systems is considered for the situation with two decision makers and a hierarchical decision structure. The leader-follower strategy is studied. To implement the leader's strategy, we propose to use a sliding mode approach, which allows the leader to constrain the state of the system within some manifold of the state space and forces the follower to choose the strategy preferable for the leader. The corresponding sliding manifolds are derived from the classical variational problem formulation for a class of systems whose right-hand side is affine with respect to the two control inputs. Numerical examples are considered with simulations to illustrate the technique.