This paper reviews a number of concepts and results relevant to the design of architectures to maintain the shape of a formation of autonomous agents. The paper begins with motivating examples from nature and the man- made world, and emphasises the task of providing satisfactory sensing, communication and control architectures within a formation of autonomous agents. Then some technical tools for characterising and designing architectures are described, largely resting on graph theoretic considerations.
Anderson, B. D. O., Yu, C., Fidan, B., & Hendrickx, J. (2006). Control and information architectures for formations. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Control Applications. Published. CCA, Munchen, Germany. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/226219